Sharif Digital Repository

The present study was conducted to examine the effect of explicit and implicit teaching of the speech acts of apologies and requests with 40 students. They were given a discourse completion test (DCT) which was designed by the researcher. The students came up with situations that embodied apologies and requests. After exemplar generation and likelihood investigation some 16 items were retained and used with students. The participants of the study consisted of two groups of implicit and explicit. The two groups were intact and randomization was not a possibility. The design was quasi-experimental. To investigate the relationship between grammatical competence and pragmatic competence, the... 

This study was a mixed-method research into the impact of emotions on the professional identities of teachers. The researcher followed Zembylas (2005a, 2005b) in conducting this study following the argument that politics and disciplinary power affect every aspect of teachers` life, hence their emotions and professional identities. Foucault (1975, 1984) was the source of theoretical underpinning in this study. The researcher used an open written interview, an attitudinal questionnaire, and a written narrative inquiry to collect the required data. Ten English language teachers (8 English Institute teachers, 2 public school teachers) took part in the first phase. One-hundred teachers from both... 

Understanding others has long been a goal of language teaching yet remaining in the background of educational practices (Liddicoat, 2012). However, the recognition of importance of intercultural competence and its integration into language teaching and learning has grown due to globalization, increased mobility, and technological development. The existing challenge in the language-teaching domain is the integration of culture and language. The benefits and significance of developing interculturally competent learners are not covert to anybody; however, the important consideration of teaching culture is the necessity of amalgamating language and culture in an interculturally oriented language... 

Textbooks play major roles in education and incorporation of textbooks into the courses can better the outcome of the learning (McGrath, 2006; Sheldon, 1988). Considering the role of textbooks, it seems crucial to examine and evaluate textbooks to select the best material for the educational courses (Tomlinson, 2001). This study focused on the evaluation of the EFL textbook, Prospect 1, which is currently taught at secondary schools of Iran. The researcher intended to evaluate the textbook from the perspectives of both teachers and learners based on the evaluation model proposed by Litz (2005). The participants of the study were 173 learners and 102 teachers who filled out the questionnaires... 

According to Sheldon (1988) textbooks are visible hearts of any English language teaching program. Relevant textbooks are prerequisites of an appropriate teaching and learning situation (Hutchinson & Torres, 1994). Evaluation is helpful for making subsequent informed decisions through providing information on the usefulness and effectiveness of textbooks (Allwright, 1981). The Right Path to English and English Book are two Iranian textbook series that have been prescribed by the Ministry of Education for teaching in public Junior and Senior high schools, respectively. Employing Litz's (2005) questionnaires, attitudes of Iranian learners and teachers were obtained on both the series.... 

The present study examines the effects of participation in a critical reflective online course upon the participants’ identity. The study drew upon both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. The 38 participants of the study who were first degree students at Sharif University of Technology participated in ten online sessions in which ten prompts concerning intercultural issues were introduced. The data collected in the online course underwent inductive qualitative content analysis which resulted in the extraction of five themes. Following this, 18 participants were interviewed to throw more light on these findings. Qualitative and Quantitative content analyses of the data... 

The importance of vocabulary, the building blocks of every language, in having a good command of a second language is evident. However, the best way to improve the lexical knowledge of the students is an issue that is open to discussions. This study aimed at investigating three different methods for teaching new vocabularies to Iranian students who were striving to take command of English as a second language in order to determine the advantages of one method over the other in terms of immediate and delayed retention. In this endeavor, we set 105 intermediate adult learners of English into three groups and instructed each group with a specific method, teaching them a number of new words... 

This study aimed to explore whether an online writing system designed with the premises of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and supported by the theoretical frameworks of metacognition contributed to the improvement of Iranian university students’ academic genre-based writing performance. The study also sought to find out whether learners’ proficiency level influenced the effect of the system on academic writing. As an extension of the work reported earlier by Yeh (2014), an online writing system was developed and a sample of 30 undergraduate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students, at three levels of proficiency, studying at Sharif University of Technology in Iran were... 

Many structural systems may experience some local damage during their lifetime. If the local damage is not identified timely, it may lead to undesirable consequences. Vibration-based damage detection techniques of structures are global methods and are based on the assumption that damage alters both the physical properties, such as mass, stiffness and damping, as well as the dynamic properties of the structures. It is therefore feasible to utilize measured dynamic quantities, such as time histories, frequency response functions (FRFs) and modal parameters, from structural vibration to detect damage. Damage identification based on vibration characteristics is essentially a form of pattern... 

In the past few decades the use of textbooks has increased dramatically in ELT due to the growing need for English both as a foreign and second language all over the world. Along with this growth in textbook application in ELT, textbook evaluation as a comparably new line of esearch has gained significant attention from both researchers and ELT specialists. As an attempt to contribute to this growing body of research, the present study was conducted to evaluate eight most popular global and local textbooks which are taught in Iranian ELT institutes in order to investigate the realization of environmental and human rights issues as well as other various topics in ELT textbooks in Iranian... 

In the current situation and considering the economic conditions, entrepreneurship and self-employment are important factors of business growth. To prepare people in this field, there is a need for effective training that can motivate people. Identifying the effective methods and different dimensions of the entrepreneurship education framework that can lead to setting up a successful program for training people and facilitate the way to achieve the goal of education is one of the important goals of this research. By studying the literature from 2010 onwards, this research systematically examined 96 articles and tried to improve the framework of entrepreneurship education that was stated in... 

In addition to being their primary means of communication with the people around them, sign language for deaf children plays a significant role in shaping their intellectual and cognitive development. Research has shown that the use of robots in education has a substantial impact on the learning process of the learner. As the teaching process requires long-term interaction with different users, the use of adaptable techniques enables the creation of a social robot capable of productive interaction with users of varying performance levels. One of the objectives of this research is to use continual learning algorithms to enhance adaptability in the teaching process. Another goal is to design...