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 to investigate the effect of using model essays on the development of writing proficiency of iranian pre-intermediate efl learners. to fulfill the purpose of the study, 55 pre- intermediate learners of parsa language institute were chosen by means of administering proficiency test. based on the results of the pretest, two matched groups, one as the expe...

according to coates’s (2004, as cited in zhang, 2010) definition of "conversational dominance" (p.111), it refers to the phenomenon of a speaker dominating others in interaction. specifically, it means how a speaker makes use of certain strategies to get the floor and maintain the floor. thus, the amount of talk is the main measurement for the dominance of the conversation. whether a speaker do...

the present study aimed to investigate the possible effects of focused highlighted error feedback on grammatical accuracy of writing among iranian intermediate efl learners. after selecting 52 homogenous participants from among 70 university students attending azad university of rasht and randomly dividing them into two intact groups of 26 students, the researcher exposed the participants of th...

since the 1960s the age effects on learning both first and second language have been explored by many linguists and applied linguists (e.g lennerberg, 1967; schachter, 1996; long, 1990) and the existence of critical period for language acquisition was found to be a common ground of all these studies. in spite of some common findings, some issues about the impacts of age on acquiring a second or...

the purpose of the present study is to find out whether bilinguals of khuzestan-arab origin or monolinguals of iranian origin code-switch during learning or speaking english and which group is more susceptible to code-switch. to this end, the students of 24 classes from high schools and pre- university centers were screened out, and interviewed and their voices and code-switchings were recorded...

this study examined the effects of collaborative strategic reading and direct instruction in persuasion on iranian high school students persuasive writing and attitudes. students in three intact classes were assigned to one of three treatment conditions: collaborative strategic reading and direct instruction in persuasion or direct instruction in persuasion or a control group. treatment effects...

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 ...

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...