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 present study reports an analysis of response articles in four different disciplines in the social sciences, i.e., linguistics, english for specific purposes (esp), accounting, and psychology. the study has three phases: micro analysis, macro analysis, and e-mail interview. the results of the micro analysis indicate that a three-level linguistic pattern is used by the writers in order to cr...

abstract this mixed method study examines whether there is any relationship among the variables of the study (job satisfaction, social capital and motivation). the researcher considered job satisfaction and social capital as independent variables; motivation is the dependent variable of the study. the researcher applied a questionnaire to assess each variable. to measure efl teachers’ job sati...

this study was an attempt to investigate the effect of using c-test passages on the reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary learning of iranian intermediate efl learners. the participants were 60 male efl learners at kish mehr institute in garmsar. in fact, there were two groups, an experimental group and a comparison group with 30 students in each. the participants were pretested throu...

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...

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...

abstract pragmatics is the study of communicative action in its sociocultural context. communicative action includes not only using speech acts (such as apologizing, complaining, complimenting, and requesting), but also engaging in different types of discourse and participating in speech events of varying length and complexity. the present study aimed to investigate the assessment of pragm...

this study investigated how group formation method, namely student-selected vs. teacher-assigned, influences the results of the community model of teaching creative writing; i.e., group dynamics and group outcome (the quality of performance). the study adopted an experimental comparison group and microgenetic research design to observe the change process over a relatively short period of time. ...

the effect of learning strategies on the speaking ability of iranian students in the context of language institutes abstract language learning strategies are of the most important factors that help language learners to learn a foreign language and how they can deal with the four language skills specifically speaking skill effectively. acknowledging the great impact of learning strategies...

the present paper investigates how far ideologies can be tease out in discourse by examining the employed schemata by two ideologically opposed news media, the bbc and press tv, to report syria crisis during a period of nine months in 2011. by assuming that news is not a valuefree construction of facts and drawing on micro structural approach of schema theory, for the first time in discours...