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...

this study is an outlook of iranians religious practices and customs in eras such as nasser one. it attempts to answer the main question, "religious practices and ceremonies in the society during naseri ruling" and other subsidiary questions with scientific and historical theories. iran was a traditional and religious community . people abided by their religious practices and duties within reli...

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...

cultural iran is a scope that is more extended than the political territories of iran as a political unit. this concept means that cultural geography(mehdi moghanlo-1383-1) of iran is greater than its political geography which, according to history, has a long history extending west-east from kandahar to the euphrates and north-south from the persian gulf to the caucasus including transoxiana a...

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...

nowadays enhancing critical thinking in learners is considered one of the foreign language teachers’ tasks due to its high position in foreign language classrooms. when it comes to selecting materials for language classrooms, there are obviously some criteria that teachers should apply. the present study aimed at a critical thinking based analysis of ten picture story books and ten folktales th...

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...

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...

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...