the importance of writing as a complex skill in applied linguistics has drawn the attention of many researchers to evaluate textbooks in order to help learners gain self-sufficiency and autonomy in the field of language use and communication. investigations have shown that developments in textbooks evaluation can promote the quality of pedagogies and consequently the learning. this study attemp...

efl/esl textbooks have been regarded as essential language teaching materials with which the learners spend about 70 up to 90 percent of their class time. the important role they play and their vast use make them not only influential in learning the language but also in shaping values and attitudes. put it another way, textbooks socialize learners using their contents (i.e. texts, illustrations...

the aim of conducting this study was to investigate the foreign language learning needs of undergraduate economics students and business management students in faculties of social sciences of alzahra and azad naragh university. in the study, which was designed on the basis of a qualitative-quantitative basis using interviews and questionnaires, 146 female undergraduate business management as we...

to discuss my point, i have collected quite a number of articles, anthologies, and books about "wuthering heights" applying various ideas and theories to this fantastic story. hence, i have come to believe that gadamer and jauss are rightful when they claim that "the individaul human mind is the center and origin of all meaning," 3 that reading literature is a reader-oriented activity, that it ...

abstract over the past two decades, applied linguists and language teachers have shown a great deal of interest in genre-centered approaches , mainly because of pedagogic concerns . this has been due to the need to help non-native readers enhance their ability to understand academic and scientific texts. following swales’ (1981) works on genre analysis, studies of different sections of resear...

from 1950s onward, new theories and critical approaches burgeoned across humanities. these theories were context-oriented; as a result, the analysis of discursive practices gained significance. thus, social, political, historical and cultural discourses that have been hitherto marginalized and considered inferior to literary texts, were introduced as important texts to be analyzed by critics. o...

the present study aimed to investigate representation of discourse markers and metadiscourse markers in conversations and readings of general elt coursebook series used in the language centers of iran. to this aim, four elt coursebooks popularly taught in language centers of this country were analyzed based on fung and carter’s (2007) framework regarding discourse markers and hyland’s (2005) fr...

this study was conducted to investigate the impact of podcasts as a learning and teaching tool on iranian efl learners’ motivation for listening as well as on their listening comprehension ability. the study also investigated the learners’ perception towards listening to podcasts and examined whether the learners were likely to accept podcasts. out of fifty-five intermediate learners studying e...

a problem of computer vision applications is to detect regions of interest under dif- ferent imaging conditions. the state-of-the-art maximally stable extremal regions (mser) detects affine covariant regions by applying all possible thresholds on the input image, and through three main steps including: 1) making a component tree of extremal regions’ evolution (enumeration), 2) obtaining region ...