methodology non-native participants in this study were sixty ba students majoring in english literature and teaching english as a foreign language at khayyam university of mashhad. they were senior students, between 21 to 24 years old, who had studied english for at least three and a half years and had passed several courses including grammar, reading, conversation, and writing. this was assum...

the present paper offers a postcolonial reading of two of the best novels by v. s. naipaul – half a life and the mimic men – in five chapters. the focus of this research is on different notions of postcolonial criticism and their application on the two novels as discussed from homi bhabha’s and frantz fanons points of view. having introduced the life and literary career of v. s. naipaul in th...

this thesis is a study on insurance fraud in iran automobile insurance industry and explores the usage of expert linkage between un-supervised clustering and analytical hierarchy process(ahp), and renders the findings from applying these algorithms for automobile insurance claim fraud detection. the expert linkage determination objective function plan provides us with a way to determine whi...

apart from other aspects, desert is a natural environment and is one of the appealing terrestrial elements. putting its symbolic and fictional senses aside, the term “desert” bears mystic sense more than material sense. in addition to the worlds materialistic experiences, desert has attracted the attention of writers because it creates a kind of inner experience, which returns the individual in...

these days, all department stores make an effort to provide their clients with valuable products in order to project the best image for them. as a result, clients’ comprehension risk will decrease and they will be more willing to repurchase. having a good image is really important for the department stores because it makes an impression on clients’ comprehension of both quality and risk. consid...

the purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate the relation between efl teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs and their success. moreover, the study was an analysis of the teacher age, gender and years of teaching experience, to examine the manner in which these factors relate to teacher self-efficacy as defined by bandura (1997) and teaching effectiveness as evaluated by their own student...

abstract: postmethod is a newly developed pedagogy which as an alternative to method rejects the notion of good or bad methods and the concept of best method that can be generalized and appropriate for all contexts. instead, it treats each context as unique and one of a kind which cant be compared with other cases. this study is a postmethod-oriented one which investigates whether and how far t...

the present study aimed at exploring cognitions of iranian english teachers within the context of english for academic purposes (eap). to this end, the cognitions of two groups of eap teachers with respect to their pedagogical content knowledge (pck) and their sense of professional identity (pi) were probed. two language teachers and two content instructors who had at least five years of eap te...

testing plays a vital role in any language teaching program. it allows teachers and stakeholders, including program administrators, parents, admissions officers and prospective employers to be assured that the learners are progressing according to an accepted standard (douglas, 2010). the problems currently facing language testers have both practical and theoretical implications but the first i...

seismic retrofit strategies have been developed in the past few decades following the introduction of new seismic provisions and the availability of advanced materials and methods. it can be observed that new approaches to deal with more lateral forces are more innovative and more energy absorbent. in line with this, there is a growing trend toward the use of steel shear walls as a system with ...