data envelopment analysis (dea) is a powerful tool for measuring relative efficiency of organizational units referred to as decision making units (dmus). in most cases dmus have network structures with internal linking activities. traditional dea models, however, consider dmus as black boxes with no regard to their linking activities and therefore do not provide decision makers with the reasons...

charles dickens was a voracious reader even in his childhood. his early reading of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century picaresque fiction greatly influenced his writing style. his first novel, the pickwick papers, is a tale of rogues and swindlers, adventures and quests, satire and comedy, and innocence and experience. oliver twist, dickens’ second novel, is a young boy’s progress through a cor...

abstract the present study was conducted in order to investigate the impact of an integrated model of form-focused and task-based instruction on iranian efl learners vocabulary learning and retention.it also aimed to detect efl learners attitude towards the implementation of form-focused task-based vocabulary instruction in the classroom. in order to address the purposes of this study, a sampl...

abstract following innovations in the field of elt, a new topic which has recently attracted a lot of attention is metaphor analysis. although this area of research is still in its infancy in elt, it seems that the idea can shed more light on the puzzle of english language learning and teaching. therefore, the major aim of this study is to analyze language learning and teaching in formal a...

according to cheng (1999), in recent esl/efl literature, asian (especially east asian) learners of english as a foreign/second language have been arguably reported as reticent and passive learners. the most common allegations are that these students are reluctant to participate in classroom discourse; they are unwilling to give responses; they do not ask questions; and they are passive and over...

in this study, the effects of oleothermal modification on physical and mechanical peroperties of fir wood (abeis sp.) blocks were examined. at first, some blocks of fir wood with 5 × 20 × 120 cm dimensions were prepared. the blocks were treated in soybean oil. the effects of 3 factors such as treatments temperature (180and 200 °c), holding time (12 and 15 h) and initial moisture content of wood...

cohesion is an indispensable linguistic feature in discourse analysis. lexicald such a differe cohesion and conjunction in particular as two crucial elements to textual cohesion and comprehension has been the focus of a wide range of studies up to now. yet the relationship between the open register and cohesive devices has not been thoroughly investigated in discourse studies. this study concen...

this study was conducted to investigate the impact of portfolio assessment as a process-oriented assessment mechanism on iranian efl students’ english writing and its subskills of focus, elaboration, organization, conventions, and vocabulary. out of ninety juniors majoring in english literature and translation at the university of isfahan, sixty one of them who were at the same level of writing...

the present research was conducted to explore the effect of employing two language teaching approaches, i.e. schema-based instruction (sbi) and translation-based instruction (tbi), on vocabulary knowledge, structure and reading comprehension ability of forty one female students learning english in grade one senior high school in rivash, kuhsorkh, iran. while sbi focuses on schemata, i.e. words ...

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 ...