any change in the refractive index of a laser active medium can lead to serious degradation of beam quality, laser beam modes, laser performance and variation in the intensity distribution. alteration in the refractive index of laser active medium is especially notable in high power lasers. it is clear that in the laser beam production, the pumping agent induces a great amount of heat which...

the present study was an attempt to conduct a contrastive analysis between general english (ge) and english for specific purposes (esp) texts in terms of cohesion and cohesive devices. to this end, thirty texts from different esp and ge textbooks were randomly selected. then they were analyzed manually to find the frequency of cohesive devices. cohesive devices include reference, substitution, ...

august wilson is undoubtedly one of the rare black playwrights whose works have attracted streams of attention and worldwide audience. the present study aims at analyzing fences and piano lesson which are two of the most successful plays in his pittsburgh cycle from the perspective of michel foucault’s theories and ideas. studying these two plays from foucault’s perspective opens new windows in...

the purpose of this thesis was to investigate how differently metacognitive, cognitive, and social/affective strategies affect l2 learners’ reading comprehension. to this end, the study employed a quasi-experimental design with a placement test as a proficiency test to find the homogeneity of groups. three classes were randomly selected as the experimental groups (n =90), and each class was tau...

the major aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between social and cultural capital and efl students’ critical thinking skills. this study takes this relationship in to account to see if people with different sociocultural status are different regarding their critical thinking skills. to this end, 160 university students majoring in english language and literature, english trans...

within communicative, interactive, and learner-centered framework of language teaching and learning, students need to learn four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing for their educational success. but of all the language skills, reading enjoys a paramount significance in so many second or foreign language academic contexts. in spite of its importance, language learners still have...

the major aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between iq, eq and test format in the light of test fairness considerations. this study took this relationship into account to see if people with different eq and iq performed differently on different test formats. to this end, 90 advanced learners of english form college of ferdowsi university of mashhad were chosen. they were ask...

the present study sought to investigate the role of dynamic assessment (da) in improvement of iranian efl writing performance at different language proficiency levels. to this end, after conducting the quick placement test, 60 iranian efl learners were assigned to two groups with different language proficiency levels. in both groups each participant wrote two compositions, one before and one af...

with the introduction of communicative language teaching, a large number of studies have concerned with students’ oral participation in language classrooms. although the importance of classroom participation is evident, some language learners are unwilling to engage in oral activities. this passivity and unwillingness to participate in language classroom discussions is known as “reticence”. rev...

the aim of the present study was to investigate the frequency and the type of discourse markers used in the argumentative and expository writings of iranian efl learners and the differences between these text features in the two essay genres. the study also aimed at examining the influence of the use of discourse markers on the participants’ writing quality. to this end the discourse markers us...