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...

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...

abstract: postmethod is a newly developed pedagogy which as an alternative to method rejects the notion of good or bad methods and the concept of best method that can be generalized and appropriate for all contexts. instead, it treats each context as unique and one of a kind which cant be compared with other cases. this study is a postmethod-oriented one which investigates whether and how far t...

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...

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...

insurers have in the past few decades faced longevity risks - the risk that annuitants survive more than expected - and therefore need a new approach to manage this new risk. in this dissertation we survey methods that hedge longevity risks. these methods use securitization to manage risk, so using modern financial and insurance pricing models, especially wang transform and actuarial concepts, ...

abstract previous studies on willingness to communicate (wtc) have shown the influence of many individual or situational factors on students’ tendency to engage in classroom communication, in which wtc has been viewed either at the trait-level or situational level. however, due to the complexity of the notion of willingness to communicate, the present study suggests that these two strands are ...

this study focuses on tracing the clearly defined elements of magic realism in toni morrison’s song of solomon as an illustrious african american example of the mode. magic realism is a fictional technique that combines fantasy with raw physical reality in a search for truth beyond that available from the surface of everyday life. toni morrison, as a distinguished african-american practitioner ...

writing as a productive skill requires practice in the basic sub-skills of vocabulary and grammar. in fact, grammar has been viewed as the core of programs in writing classes to help the students put the elements of sentence together and combine sentences of specific lengths to come up with an error-free work of art. conceptualizing l2 writing in this way introduces writing as a product and enc...