in the past couple of decades sociocultural theory of sla and its implications in efl contexts have attracted attentions of research circles worldwide and aroused some controversies. firth and wagner (1997) have questioned the principles of the cognitive view which gives importance to mental constructs in favor of sociocultural view which highlights social and contextual constructs. but if soci...

the debate whether esp teachers need to have knowledge of the specialized field they are teaching has been an issue in the literature over the last two decades. the aim of conducting this study was to explore iranian learners’ and instructors’ beliefs and attitudes concerning the role of specialized knowledge in teaching esp classes. a seventeen item questionnaire was administered to 400 esp le...

the images of muslims in media, literature and politics have been mostly black and white portrayals of a people alien to modernity, civilization, rationality and pluralism. since the end of the cold war and the onset of deadly terrorist attacks in different areas of the world, especially in the united states, these representations show a palpable difference: muslims are represented not only as ...

abstract: about 60% of total premium of insurance industry is pertained?to life policies in the world; while the life insurance total premium in iran is less than 6% of total premium in insurance industry in 2008 (sigma, no 3/2009). among the reasons that discourage the life insurance industry is the problem of adverse selection. adverse selection theory describes a situation where the inf...

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...

abstract the current study set out to address the issue as to whether the implementation of portfolio assessment would give rise to iranian pre-intermediate efl learner autonomy. participants comprised 60 female in pre-intermediate level within the age range of 16-28.they were selected from among 90 language learners based on their scores on language proficiency test -key english test. then, t...

esl/efl books play a crucial role in shaping language learners worldview of gender roles in society. the present study investigated the status of sexism in two sets of efl textbooks, one developed by non-native iranian authors (ili series) and the other by native authors (top notch series). first, two books from each series was selected randomly. then, a quantitative analysis was carried out wi...

heuristics are often used to provide solutions for flow shop scheduling problems.the performance of a heuristic is usually judged by comparing solutions and run times on test cases.this investigation proposes an analytical alternative ,called asymptotic convergence ,which tests the convergence of the heuristic to a lower bound as problem size grows. the test is a stronger variation of worst cas...

type text or a website address or translate a document. abstract liquidity is considered the most important aspect of the development of stock markets. the main objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of the quality of financial information provided to replace its financial statements nmvdh and shrkt hayy that the liquidity of the shares on the tehran stock exchange is between the ...

the present study investigated construct equivalence of multiple choice (mc) and constructed response (cr) item types across stem and content equivalent mc and cr items (item type ‘a’), non-stem-equivalent but content equivalent mc and cr items (item type ‘b’), and non-stem and non-content equivalent mc and cr items (item type ‘c’). one hundred seventy english-major undergraduates completed mc ...