august wilson is undoubtedly one of the rare black playwrights whose works have attracted streams of attention and worldwide audience. the present study aims at analyzing fences and piano lesson which are two of the most successful plays in his pittsburgh cycle from the perspective of michel foucault’s theories and ideas. studying these two plays from foucault’s perspective opens new windows in...

in this research the focus of the researcher is on the influence of american myths that have long been held and offered by the american culture and ideologies. sam shepard is conceived to be one of the greatest playwrights of the contemporary american theater. in his works he depicts broken characters who are struggling to keep up with the national expectations but are ceaselessly borne back to...

there is less published research about how teachers in efl contexts respond to students who are relatively less mature and less competent l2 writers. while writing researchers have examined various issues concerning peer and teacher response in writing-oriented classes, little research has centered on the effect of collaborative tasks particularly dictogloss on writing skills. output collaborat...

the purpose of this study was to investigate how english language teachers in mashhad who teach students in the pre-university cycle perceived the impact of the efltee on their teaching. the target population was nearly all pre-university english language teachers in seven districts of mashhad in the scholastic year 2008/2009. a survey questionnaire which consisted of (36) likert type items, wa...

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...

acknowledgements i wish to express my gratitude to all those who have helped me in preparing this thesis. i would like to express my deep gratitude to my respected advisor dr. kourosh akef, whose advice and comments helped me in the early stages of the research and throughout the writing process. i would also like to express my gratitude to dr. hajar khanmohammad whose invaluable guidance he...

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...

terms of address as an important linguistics items provide valuable information about the interlocutors, their relationship and their circumstances. this study was done to investigate the change route of persian address terms in the two recent centuries including three historical periods of qajar, pahlavi and after the islamic revolution. data were extracted from a corpus consisting 24 novels w...

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...