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...

the current study examined iranian undergraduate efl students’ willingness to communicate with regard to their vocabulary knowledge. in general, participants were somewhat willing to communicate in english. the total mean score of 730 university students’ perception of willing to communicate was 83.53 out of 135. results, regarding four parts of willingness to communicate, revealed that part...

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...

today, the route for economic development in most countries is the same as international open competitive economy. economic institutes well known that supportive public economy belonged on the past and they may compete in the global economy. it is obvious that if they have no competitive potency or not familiar with competition technique, they may be devastated. banking system aims to collect t...

over the past decades a number of approaches have been applied for forecasting mortality. in 1992, a new method for long-run forecast of the level and age pattern of mortality was published by lee and carter. this method was welcomed by many authors so it was extended through a wider class of generalized, parametric and nonlinear model. this model represents one of the most influential recent d...

employees always concern about losing their job , or in other word , losing their income resources. for this purpose, every government requires strong system for covering these concerns. the unemployment insurance (ui) program’s can be used for achieving this goal. in this thesis, we price ui based on the insurance history of employee and the duration of being unemployed. we use the weibull dis...

reinsurance is widely recognized as an important instrument in the capital management of an insurance company as well as its risk management tool. this thesis is intended to determine premium rates for different types of reinsurance policies. also, given the fact that the reinsurance coverage of every company depends upon its reserves, so different types of reserves and the method of their calc...

the poor orientation of the restaurants toward the information technology has yet many unsolved issues in regards to the customers. one of these problems which lead the appeal list of later, and have a negative impact on the prestige of the restaurant is the case when the later does not respond on time to the customers’ needs, and which causes their dissatisfaction. this issue is really sensiti...

why some learners are willing to communicate in english, concurrently others are not, has been an intensive investigation in l2 education. willingness to communicate (wtc) proposed as initiating to communicate while given a choice has recently played a crucial role in l2 learning. it was hypothesized that wtc would be associated with language learning orientations (llos) as well as social suppo...

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, ...