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...

1.1 introduction “i see translation as the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. a good translation is like a pane of glass. you only notice that it’s there when there are little imperfections- scratches, bubbles. ideally, there shouldn’t be any. it should never call attention to itself.” “norman shapiro” (venuti, 1995:1) edward fitzgerald is the br...

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...

this thesis attempts to study the representations of the third-world intellectuals in three fictional works by the british-educated trinidadian nobel-winner v. s. naipaul: the mimic men, a bend in the river, and magic seeds. the first one recounts the story of ralph singh’s sense of alienation, his experiences as a colonial politician, and his struggle to give order to his disorderly world thro...

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...

armenias geopolitics and its historical experience have had a determining impact on the character of its foreign policy .present-day armenia is a small, landlocked country with _11,620 square miles area armenias landlocked nature makes it dependent on the benevolence of its neighbors for access to the outside world a fact that gives it a sense of isolation and vulnerability. as it was indic...

the purpose of this study is to investigate and explore the causes of identity crisis as one of the debilitating consequences of colonial project after the withdrawal of colonial power. in order to do justice to the full-length severity of displacement that was the fruit of indentureship, v. s. naipauls west indian epic, a house for mr biswas, has been scrutinized with the main focus being the ...

investigation the archetype of mother can help the reader to understand poes works, especially his fiction, better, if not fully. motivated by internal and external drives to get into the universe in its manifold form poe was impelled to art and, from various modes of art, to symbolism. how much was poe successful to produce works of art has been a matter of dispute among critics. however, ther...

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...

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...