this thesis aims at putting together two of the vestest areas of study there is in humanities: bioethics and literature. the two novels in question, oryx and crake and the year of the flood, are considered as some of the most succssful examples of spculative fiction. in these novels the biological and environmental issues raised as looked at from a bioethics point of view.

this thesis attempts to study the representations of the third-world intellectuals in three fictional works by the british-educated trinidadian nobel-winner v. s. naipaul: the mimic men, a bend in the river, and magic seeds. the first one recounts the story of ralph singh’s sense of alienation, his experiences as a colonial politician, and his struggle to give order to his disorderly world thro...

phatic communion is a cultural concept which differs across cultures. according to hofstede (2001), the u.s. tends to have individualistic culture; however, asian countries tend to have collectivistic cultures. these cultures view phatic communion differently. in individualistic cultures like u.s., phatic communion reflects speakers’ socio-cultural relationships in conversations. to see whether...

the application of a comprehensive model of communicative language ability (cla) to language teaching and testing has always been an imperative in l2 education since hymess proposal of communicative competence in the 1970s. recent l2 research has clearly underscored the importance of sufficient pragmatics representation as an essential component of cla in pedagogical and testing practices in l2...

abstract i the purpose of this study was to launch a thorough investigation concerning the possibility of differing orientations to the writing proficiency construct by native and non-native english speaking teacher raters. it mainly revolved around the international english language testing system (ielts) that is widely administered and employed as a measure of general proficiency in englis...

a major concern in the last few years has been the fact that the cultural centers are keeping distance with what they have been established for and instead of reproducing the hegemony, they have turned into a place for resistance and reproduction of resistance against hegemony. because the cultural centers, as urban public spaces in the last two decades, have been the subject of ideological dis...

while performance-based language assessment has led to an increased authenticity and content validity in the practice of writing assessment, the reliability of ratings has become a major issue. research findings have shown different reactions by native english speaker (nes) and non-native english speaker (nns) teachers to students’ writings. the focus of this study is on investigating whether i...

for several years, researchers in familiarity of efl teachers with post-method and its role in second and foreign language learners’ productions have pointed out that the opportunity to plan for a task generally develops language learners’ development (ellis, 2005). it is important to mention that the critical varies in language teaching was shown is the disappearances of the concept of method ...

an investigation into oral interaction in language classes: a conversation analytic point of view the aim of this thesis is to analyze the interaction between language teachers and students in english language institutes. this work is done in the context of yasuj city. learning another language, which is in most cases english, involves many variables. one of these variables is the linguistic...

the purpose of this study was to investigate how english language teachers in mashhad who teach students in the pre-university cycle perceived the impact of the efltee on their teaching. the target population was nearly all pre-university english language teachers in seven districts of mashhad in the scholastic year 2008/2009. a survey questionnaire which consisted of (36) likert type items, wa...