javad zare

Technology-mediated instructional activities have received increasing attention in second language acquisition (SLA) studies. Yet, research on the role of technology in language learners’ emotional intelligence has been limited. More specifically, the role of data-driven learning (DDL) using concordancing, as a technology-mediated approach to learning English, in developing emotional intelligence has been left unattended. Through a mixed-methods explanatory sequential design within a quasi-experimental comparison group pretest-posttest design, the present study examined if DDL statistically significantly influenced the English learners’ trait emotional intelligence (TEI) and its attributes, including emotionality, self-control, well-being, and sociability. The results of questionnaires, open-ended surveys, and semi-structured interviews with 92 female undergraduate English learners indicated that DDL did not statistically significantly influence their TEI and its attributes. However, in terms of well-being, learners in the experimental group were slightly higher than learners in the control group. Finally, analysis of the qualitative data pointed to an increase in the learners’ TEI through enhancing self-confidence, stress management, and emotional perception.

Produced water (PW) is the largest by-product of oil and gas production, which has a serious impact on water pollution in the offshore oil and gas industry. In industrial processes, it is necessary to separate hydrocarbons and oil along with water by methods such as gravity sedimentation, enhanced gravity sedimentation, and hydrocyclones from produced water. However, conventional technologies cannot achieve optimal separation requirements in a compact space under extreme conditions, such as emulsions and large volumes of PW. The PW treatment system must be green and efficient in order to benefit from the extensive exploration, production of offshore oil and gas in the future. Therefore, factors such as improving the purification efficiency, reducing the space occupation and the cost of practical use of a PW purification process on an offshore operational scale along with the new method of Combined fibers coalescence were investigated according to the operational works that have been don successfully.

The study aimed to examine whether and the extent to which children’s self-concept of ability is predicted by their gender, parental and teacher’s beliefs. Next, this study aimed to investigate whether and the extent to which children’s dictation performance in their native language is predicted by their gender, parental and teacher’s beliefs, and self-concept of ability. Finally, the study investigated whether and to what extent children’s reading performance in their native language is predicted by their gender, parental and teacher’s beliefs, and self-concept of ability. A total of 89 Iranian Persian-speaking elementary school fourth-graders, along with their parents and teachers, took part in the study. Five instruments were used in the study: two tests measuring the students’ reading and dictation levels in their native language, one questionnaire assessing the children’s reading and dictation-related self-concept of ability, and two questionnaires assessing the teachers’ and parents’ beliefs regarding reading and dictation level of children. Descriptive statistics, correlation, and multiple regression were run to analyze the data. The findings indicate that children’s self-concept of ability is affected by parental and teacher’s beliefs. Moreover, the results showed that children’s dictation performance is affected by their gender, self-concept of ability, parental and teacher’s beliefs. Finally, the study showed that children’s reading performance is affected by their gender, parental and teacher’s beliefs. Overall, the findings of the present study highlight the importance of children’s self-concept of ability and teachers and parents’ awareness of how their beliefs benefit students’ attainment and development of self-concept of ability.

Genre analysis studies have refined our understanding of the rhetorical organization of scientific articles. The present paper reports on a study which investigated the rhetorical organization of the conclusion section of English conceptual review articles in linguistics and applied linguistics fields. Drawing on a move-based genre analysis approach, the study was based on a corpus of more than 500 English conceptual review articles. The analysis involved detecting the generic moves and sub-moves that writers use to achieve communicative purposes. The results showed that first, conclusions in English conceptual review articles differ from conclusions in research papers in terms of primary communicative purposes. Second, conclusions of review articles contain a set five moves, including 1) territory, 2) purpose, 3) structure, 4) conclusion, and 5) suggestion. Third, conclusions of review articles feature a cyclic pattern in the last two moves, as the writer reports main findings of prior research, interprets them, relates them to educational practice, and recommends further research based on what is felt most necessary. Last but not least, unlike research papers conclusions, review articles conclusions contain ‘suggestion’ as a core feature of their rhetorical organization. The results of the study benefit both theoreticians and practitioners.

Review articles are important in academic research. Therefore, the reader can read only one review article instead of several research articles. Moreover, review articles have a higher citation rate than other articles and can thus increase the impact factor of journals. Yet, these types of articles are not very common and very few of them are published in scientific journals, especially in the fields of linguistics and applied linguistics. One of the reasons for the very few number of such articles is that such articles are difficult to write. Unfortunately, research on such articles is rare. To the best of our knowledge, only Zare & Naseri (2021) have examined the rhetorical structure of English conceptual review articles.Zare & Naseri (2021) examined the moves and steps, used in the abstracts of English conceptual review articles, published in linguistics and applied linguistics fields in prestigious international journals. Based on their observations, the writers of English conceptual review articles use moves and sub-moves in their abstracts which are different from those. These moves include a) territory, b) problem, c) purpose, d) structure, and e) conclusion. The ‘territory’ move clarifies the scope of the paper and summarizes the results of previous research. The ‘problem’ move points to the abundance of research and indicates a gap or a problem in the field. The ‘purpose’ move expresses the goals of the article and states limitations in the scope of the article, if any. The ‘structure’ move describes the methodology and structure of the article. Finally, the ‘conclusion’ move reflects the author's views and suggestions, and expresses the relevance and contribution of these views to previous research. The purpose of this study was to investigate the rhetorical structure of the introduction section of English conceptual review articles, published in prestigious international journals in the fields of linguistics and applied linguistics. 

A corpus consisting of the introduction section of 100 English-language conceptual review articles formed the basis of this study. These articles had been published in international highprofile journals in linguistics and applied linguistics from 2000 to 2018. Each major (linguistics and applied linguistics) accounted for 50 articles. In selecting the articles, different authorship aspects such as the number of authors, nationality, English language level, and whether English was their mother tongue or not were not considered. Also, only articles with separate introduction sections formed the corpus. In terms of the analytical procedure, a two-stage analytical method, based on move and sub-move, with a top-down corpus-driven discourse-analytic genre analysis approach was used. The top-down approach refers to the recognition of moves and sub-moves based on the rhetorical functions of discourse units, rather than their lexical or structural features. The corpus-driven approach refers to the fact that in order to examine the rhetorical structure of English conceptual review articles, the researchers of this study approached the articles in the corpus with a blank slate and without considering what earlier research had to offer. Therefore, we first studied some of the articles to see what moves emerged. Then, we examined them in the entire corpus. MAXQDA 2018 was used to detect and code the moves and sub-moves. After coding the moves and sub-moves, their range and frequency distribution were calculated. A third coder was invited in case disagreements happened between the two coders. 

The results of this study showed that, firstly, in terms of rhetorical structure, the introduction of English conceptual review articles is slightly different from the introduction of research articles. Second, this difference is related to the use of the following three moves, along with their sub-moves. These moves and sub-moves are: (a) Introducing the field, including 1) Expressing the importance/ centrality of the subject, 2) Summarizing the results of existing studies and inferring from them, (b) Stating the gap/ research question in the field, including 1 ) Referring to the existing gap, 2) Stating the question(s), (c) Introducing the present research, including 1) Expressing the objectives of the present research, 2) Presenting the hypothesis, 3) Presenting definitions/ explanations, 4) Presenting findings and implications, 6) Expressing the general structure of the article. The high frequency and range of these moves and their similarity to the moves of introductions in research articles indicate their importance and comprehensiveness, regardless of individual characteristics. 

The results of the present study, although not definitive, considering the limitations of the research, can be useful. Theoretically, the findings of the present study can be used to provide a corpus-driven rhetorical model for the introduction of English conceptual review articles. Practically, the results of the present study can be used to prepare textbooks, related to the writing of such articles, and teach them to those who do not have sufficient knowledge of English or even those who have a high command of English, but have difficulty in writing English conceptual review articles.

This study investigated rhetorical functions and their associated linguistic realizations in English review article abstracts. The analysis was based on a corpus of 100 English review article abstracts from linguistics and applied linguistics disciplines and followed a corpus-driven discourse analytic top-down approach. MAXQDA and WordSmith were used to code the moves and analyze their associated sub-corpora, respectively. The results of calculating range and frequency distributions showed that English conceptual review article abstracts use a rhetorical structure, different from that of research paper abstracts. This rhetorical organization is realized through a different set of moves, namely 1) establishing the territory or area of study, 2) identifying the problem, 3) introducing the present research, 4) organizing the paper, and 5) concluding or reflecting. Moreover, each move was realized through a distinct set of sub-moves. In terms of range, the moves dealing with purpose and structure were the most widely present moves; in terms of frequency distribution, the move dealing with structure was the most frequent. Furthermore, the highly frequent use of plural self-mentions indicates that in review article abstracts the emphasis is on research as a group activity inclusive of the researcher(s) and objects of study. In addition, the presence of ‘establishing the territory’, together with ‘identifying the problem’ can be seen as an attempt to sell the research. Finally, the prevalent use of the five moves showed that most review article abstracts are indicative-informative in function

The customer experience encompasses all aspects of a company's partnership: excellence in support services, promotion, packaging, product and service features, ease of use and adaptability. Customer Experience the consumer's internal and personal reaction to any direct or indirect interaction when using a business. The purpose of this study was to measure customer experience in Khorasan Razavi Telecommunication Company. In this study 384 customers of Telecommunication Company in Mashhad city participated, which was done during the first 3 months of year 1398. The research tool was a questionnaire and partial least squares analysis was used to analyze and test the research hypotheses. The results of the research hypotheses showed that brand image, service, network and customer support, billing, shop and self-service influenced the customer experience.

This paper reports the results of a corpus-driven study that investigated the structural frequency and diversity of lexical bundles in chemistry research articles. The investigation was based on a corpus of 1,185 chemistry research articles, totaling four million words. WordSmith was used to generate four-word lexical bundles and their concordance lines. Altogether, 223 lexical bundles were found. More than 55% of these bundles were phrasal; 35% of them were clausal. ‘Prepositional phrases + of’ bundles were the most frequently used bundles. Bundles with a passive verb, followed by a prepositional phrase fragment were the second most frequent bundles in the entire corpus. Bundles with the structure ‘noun phrase + of’ were the third and second most frequent bundles in the corpus and among phrasal bundles, respectively. In terms of diversity, bundles with ‘noun phrase + of’ and ‘passive + prepositional phrase fragment’ were the most varied and bundles with ‘pronoun/noun phrase + be’ structure were the least varied bundles in the entire corpus. Prepositional phrase bundles outnumbered noun phrase bundles in terms of frequency, whereas noun phrase bundles outnumbered prepositional phrase bundles in diversity. Altogether, the results show that frequency and diversity correlate with the type of phrasal lexical bundle. Moreover, the study suggests that different discourses are associated with different sets of lexical bundles with different frequency and diversity, due to the different communicative functions they follow. The paper ends with implications for future EAP research, materials development, and pedagogy.

This study was an attempt to shed light on the formulaic nature of the language of theoretical review articles. The study was based on a corpus of 517 English review articles from linguistics and applied linguistics disciplines. Following a corpus-driven discourse analytic approach, we identified four-word bundles occurring at least 20 times per million words in at least five different articles and investigated their structural and functional features. The results showed that the dominance of text-oriented and phrasal bundles, especially framing signals and prepositional phrases, indicates the highly informational nature of review articles in linguistics and applied linguistics and the importance of organizational features of discourse in articles. Moreover, the low proportion of participant-oriented bundles and resultative signals implies the writer’s avoidance to make claims and interpretations in English review articles. Additionally, the varied and frequent use of the anticipatory-it structure among clausal bundles, the low proportion of engagement bundles, and the fact that this dialogic feature of article writing was conveyed through an impersonal construction point to the writer’s reluctance to explicitly show commitment to his/her evaluations. Finally, expressing stance through anticipatory-it constructions and shell nouns indicates the writer’s intention to hide or foreground authorial observations, interpretations, and claims.

Extended abstract Background Academic lectures play a significant role in academic education. The importance of lectures in academic education has made some scholars believe that comprehending lectures is critical to the students’ academic success (e.g., Olsen & Huckin, 1990). Yet, understanding academic lectures is a considerable challenge for students in English-medium classes (e.g., Olsen & Huckin, 1990;). Even advanced EFL/ESL learners suffer from this problem. Part of this difficulty is because academic lectures are highly packaged. On the other hand, lectures are full of expressions that structure the discourse. Therefore, it is important to investigate these expressions. Some of these expressions help students distinguish between important and unimportant information which are referred to as relevance markers (Crawford Camiciottoli, 2007; Deroey & Taverniers, 2012; Hunston, 1994) and ‘selection cues’ (Titsworth & Kiewra, 2004). Thompson (2003) investigated text-structuring metadiscourse in academic lectures. Thompson distinguished text-structuring metadiscourse statements according to the three features of (i) reference to the content, or topic, (ii) reference to the talk, or part of the talk, and (iii) interpersonal reference, or referring to the speaker or the audience. Specifically, some of the statements that refer to the lecturer or the audience are instances of importance marking (e.g., ok now let me make two points about how nonverbal communication functions). Analyzing a small corpus comprising 12 Business Studies lectures delivered by UK, US and NNS lecturers and 10 MICASE lectures from different disciplines, Crawford Camiciottoli (2004, 2007) observes six retrospective and prospective patterns for relevance markers with various combinations of deictics, determiners, relevance adjectives, metalinguistic nouns, and the linking verb ‘is’. The retrospective patterns include ‘DEIC + IS + ADJ (e.g. This is important), DEIC + IS + ADJ + META N (e.g. That’s a key question), DEIC + IS + (-ADJ) + META N (e.g. That’s the point), IT + IS+ ADJ + THAT + DEIC (e.g. It’s crucial that this is clear), IT + IS + ADJ + TO-INF + DEIC (e.g. It’s important to see this) and THERE + IS (-ADJ) + A LOT (e.g. There’s a lot to be said about that)’ (2004, p. 90). The prospective patterns are ‘WHAT + IS + ADJ + IS (e.g. What is important is), DET + ADJ + META N + IS (e.g. The main point is), DET (-ADJ) + META N + IS (e.g. The thing is), IT + IS + ADJ + THAT (e.g. It’s crucial that), IT + IS + ADJ + TO-INF (e.g. It’s important to see) and THERE + IS + (-ADJ) + META N (e.g. There is an issue here about)’ (2004, p. 90). Methodology The Persian corpus of SOKHAN based the foundation for this research. The Persian corpus of SOKHAN was developed at the Science and Technology Park of North Khorasan, Iran under the directorship of Javad Zare and Zahra Keivanlou-Shahrestanaki. Corpus development was assisted by funding from the Technology University of Esfarayen and the Science and Technology Park of North Khorasan. SOKHAN consists of audio and video recordings, and the transcripts of 60 Persian academic lectures, totaling 480,526 words. The lectures of SOKHAN were recorded between 2010 and 2015. They are delivered mainly by male native speakers of Persian lecturers. The lectures of SOKHAN evenly spread in the four disciplinary groups of engineering (es), humanities (hs), medicine (ms), and base sciences (bs). A mixed-methods (exploratory) approach and a corpus-driven method were adopted in this study. Importance markers were first derived from the Persian Corpus of Sokhan by reading their transcripts. 293 concordances of importance marking expressions were retrieved from the corpus and were analyzed in terms of positioning—anaphoric, cataphoric, —and discourse functions. Results and conclusion Analysis of the importance markers led to some findings that are worth noting. As regards the position of the importance markers, eight patterns were found for anaphoric importance markers. Among these, the patterns ‘hd (highlighted discourse) + exam points’ and ‘hd + deic mn v-link (adv) ADJ’ were more frequent than others. For cataphoric importance markers, ten patterns were found, among which ‘V + hd’ outnumbered others. Generally, cataphoric importance markers were found to be substantially more frequent than anaphoric importance markers. Moreover, as regards the discourse functions of the expressions that signal importance of points, five discourse functions were found. These include discourse organization, audience engagement, subject status, topic treatment, and relating to exam. Importance markers dealing with audience engagement were found to be the most frequently used expressions. On the whole, the findings suggest that lecturers tend to function interpersonally in Persian academic contexts when it comes signaling importance.

This study was an attempt to investigate the reflection of ideological beliefs in the national anthems (NAs) of three groups of countries, i.e. capitalist, socialist, and muslim. Additionally, the study was aimed at revealing a taxonomy of the ideological themes and their associated concepts marked in NAs. To this end, English translation of transcriptions of more than 53 national anthems (totaling 10,000 words) was examined. The analysis showed both slight and marked differences among the NAs of the three groups of countries. The findings indicated both slight and marked differences in the reflection of each ideological concept. Capitalist countries NAs had more frequent representation of ideological themes and concepts, compared to those of the socialist and muslim countries. Regardless of the ideological positions of the three groups of countries, nationalism was found to be the most frequently represented theme. Freedom and unity were represented repeatedly in NAs of socialist countries, whereas religious concepts were largely ignored.

  Comprehending English academic lectures is difficult for students whose mother tongue is not English. This difficulty is mostly due to the ephemeral nature of lectures and information overload. An understanding of how importance is signified in lectures might benefit lecture comprehension; to this end, this paper studies English academic lectures as a case study of reference in importance markers.
Expressions that help students distinguish between important and unimportant information are referred to as ‘relevance markers’ (Crawford Camiciottoli, 2007; Deroey & Taverniers, 2012a; Hunston, 1994), ‘importance cues’ (Kiewra, 2002), ‘emphasizers’ (Siepmann, 2005), ‘selection cues’ (Titsworth & Kiewra, 2004), and ‘focusers’ (Simpson, 2004).
According to Hunston (1994), relevance markers have four distinguishing features. First, they may be retrospective or prospective (p.199); this feature is related to the placement of the important information, no matter whether it is placed before or after the importance marker. Second, relevance markers overtly mark the relevance of preceding, or subsequent stretches of text (p.199); this feature is related to the use of evaluative language (e.g., important, unimportant) to mark importance. Third, relevance markers evaluate the discourse itself and are thus metadiscoursal (p. 199). Finally, they play an important role in organizing discourse (p. 199).
Deroey (2015) has derived importance markers from 160 lectures of the BASE corpus and classified them in terms of participants` orientation and discourse. Deroey observed that importance markers pertaining to content, listener, speaker, or joint orientation followed the patterns of ‘MN v-link’, ‘V n/clause’, ‘1s pers pron V n/clause’, and ‘1p pers pron V n/clause’, respectively. Additionally, importance markers with prospective, retrospective, or combined orientation to highlighted discourse had the patterns of [‘V n/clause’ and ‘MN v-link’], [‘deic v-link ADJ’, ‘deic v-link MN’, and ‘deic v-link adj MN’], and [‘1s pers pron V n/clause’ and ‘deic v-link adj MN’], respectively. Deroey also found most markers to be directed towards either the content (e.g. the point is) or the listeners (e.g. you should remember). Few importance markers were observed to be oriented towards the speaker (e.g. I should stress) or the speaker and listeners jointly (e.g. I want you to notice). Moreover, Deroey found many content-oriented markers with secondary listener orientation (e.g., these are the things to take home).
Partington (2014) examined importance marking at local and macro levels in TED talks. The corpus Partington based his study on comprised transcripts of 27 TED talks gathered in 2007- 2012 and was downloadable from the TED website. Generally, Partington found importance marking in TED talks to be of two types: endophoric and exophoric. Endophoric importance marking indicates that what the speaker is about to say (cataphoric marking)– or has just said (anaphoric marking)– is a key point in the development of his/her talk. Exophoric importance marking or ‘real-world oriented’ importance marking (Thompson & Hunston, 2000, p. 24) stresses how the topic the speaker is expounding on, or the work he/she is describing, has importance in real, extra-textual world (Thompson & Hunston, 2000). Partington found exophoric importance marking or ‘reference to real-world considerations’ to be the most common type of importance marking (p. 149).

The analytical procedure of this study was a combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. A corpus-driven approach was followed to retrieve importance markers and a discourse analytic approach was followed to investigate their reference.
The corpus used in this investigation to derive importance markers was British Academic Spoken English (BASE) Corpus. The BASE corpus was developed at the Universities of Warwick and Reading in England under the directorship of Hilary Nesi and Paul Thompson. BASE comprises the audio and video recordings, and the transcripts of 160 English lectures and 39 seminars, totaling 1,644,942 words. The lecture section which is the basis for the analysis of this paper contains 1,186,290 words; they were recorded between 1998 and 2005. Lectures are equally distributed across four broad disciplinary groups, i.e. arts and humanities (ah), life and medical sciences (ls), physical sciences (ps), and social studies (ss).
The transcripts of 160 English academic lectures of the BASE corpus, delivered by male and female lecturers, were investigated. 1,350 concordances of importance markers were extracted and analyzed in terms of reference—anaphoric, cataphoric, and shared.

The results showed that (1) both male and female lecturers tend to give cataphoric reference to importance markers in organizing discourse and subject status, than anaphoric one; (2) male and female lecturers use anaphoric and cataphoric importance marking equally in topic treatment markers of importance; (3) exam-related issue is necessarily done through anaphoric importance marking by both male and female lecturers; and (4) audience engagement markers are more cataphoric than anaphoric. By and large, the results showed that most importance markers are cataphoric in reference

Inducers are important devices which are mounted upstream of the inlet to the main impeller of the centrifugal pump to achieve higher suction performance and rotate with the same speed as the impeller. Inducers improve the hydraulic performance and lifespan of the pump through increasing the inlet pressure, but the quantity of the improvement is dependent on the geometrical parameters of the inducer. Therefore, the optimization of these parameters is crucial. In the present study, the performance of an inducer is optimized by considering the inlet tip blade angle, the outlet tip blade angle and the ratio of the outlet hub radius to inlet hub radius as design variables and the head coefficient, the hydraulic efficiency and the required net positive suction head as objective functions. The inducer performance is simulated using 3-D computational fluid dynamics and compared with experimental data which shows the validity of the used method and assumptions. The artificial neural network is used to relate between design variables and objective functions. Then, the Pareto fronts are plotted using the modified non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II and the proposed optimum points are presented using nearest point to the ideal point method. Using multi objective optimization, the head coefficient, the hydraulic efficiency and the net positive suction head are improved 14.3%, 0.3% and 30.2%, respectively. Recommended design points unveil important optimal design principles that would not have been obtained without the use of a multi objective optimization approach.

Background University students have to deal with a number of academic skills and literacies such as listening to academic lectures, taking notes, and writing academic essays. The students’ success in their academic work depends on their successful undertaking of these skills. Yet, many students find it difficult to cope with these literacies. English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) students may run further into problem, as they lack the necessary skills to comprehend and produce a diverse range of complex academic discourses.
One of these skills, academic lecturing plays a significant role in academic education. The importance of lectures in academic education has made some scholars believe that comprehending lectures is of critical importance to the students’ academic success. Yet, understanding academic lectures is a considerable challenge for students in English-medium classes. Part of this difficulty has been attributed to “an overwhelming impression of speed and a lack of control over the speaker” (Lynch, 2011, p. 81). Additionally, academic lectures have “very dense informational packaging” (Lin, 2010, p. 1174). Lectures abound with important information. The dense distribution of information in lectures makes it difficult for the students to comprehend all the information presented throughout the lecture. Therefore, it is important for the students to be able to differentiate between important and unimportant information.
Expressions that help students differentiate between important and unimportant information are referred to as relevance/importance markers (Crawford Camiciottoli, 2007; Deroey& Taverniers, 2012; Hunston, 1994), ‘importance cues’ (Kiewra, 2002), ‘emphasizers’ (Siepmann, 2005), ‘selection cues’ (Titsworth & Kiewra, 2004), and ‘focusers’ (Simpson, 2004).
With these points in mind, an understanding of how important information is distinguished from unimportant information in academic lectures is of crucial importance. Nevertheless, very little is known about them. Except for a few studies that have specifically dealt with importance marking in English lectures (Crawford Camiciottoli, 2004, 2007; Deroey, 2015; Deroey & Taverniers, 2012), what we know about this function is limited to studies that have found examples of importance markers (Biber, 2006; DeCarrico & Nattinger, 1988; Young, 1994; among others). Furthermore, it is now widely recognized that discourse structuring or organization devices facilitate the students’ comprehension, note-taking and recall of lectures (e.g., Olsen & Huckin, 1990).This study attempts to explore importance marking in English and Persian academic lectures.
Methodology The study adopts an approach which is descriptive, contrastive, and corpus-driven. It aims at eliciting the importance markers from the English and Persian academic lectures. All the importance markers in the academic lectures were elicited from two corpora. Afterwards, the elicited importance markers from the Persian and English academic lectures were investigated functionally.
To be more exact, two corpora were used in this research to explore the un/importance markers: the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) Corpus and the Persian corpus of SOKHAN. The BASE corpus was developed at the Universities of Warwick and Reading, England under the directorship of Hilary Nesi and Paul Thompson. BASE comprises the audio and video recordings, and the transcripts of 160 English lectures and 39 seminars, totaling 1,644,942 words (Nesi, 2012). The lecture section which is the basis for the analysis of this dissertation contains 1,186,290 words. The lectures were recorded between 1998 and 2005. Lectures are equally distributed across four broad disciplinary groups, i.e. arts and humanities (ah), life and medical sciences (ls), physical sciences (ps), and social studies (ss).
The Persian corpus of SOKHAN was developed at the Science and Technology Park of North Khorasan, Iran under the directorship of Javad Zare and Zahra Keivanlou-Shahrestanaki. Corpus development was assisted by funding from the Technology University of Esfarayen and the Science and Technology Park of North Khorasan. SOKHAN consists of audio and video recordings, and the transcripts of 60 Persian academic lectures, totaling 480,526 words. The lectures of SOKHAN were recorded between 2010 and 2015. They are delivered mainly by the male native speakers of Persian lecturers. The lectures of SOKHAN evenly spread in the four disciplinary groups of engineering (es), humanities (hs), medicine (ms), and base sciences (bs).
Results and conclusion The findings suggest that regardless of language, importance marking in the academic lectures is done via five discourse functions including audience engagement, discourse organization, subject status, topic treatment, and being related to exam. Besides, differentiating between the important points and the trivial ones is not necessarily done via only a single discourse function. Another finding of this research is that topic treatment markers of importance indicate importance only implicitly. It should be noted that audience engagement markers of importance were found to be the most frequently used markers in the academic lectures. Generally, marking importance in the English and Persian academic lectures mostly involves orienting the discourse to the audience. To put it differently, the presenters mostly tend to get engaged with the audience in order to indicate the important information.

This study was an attempt to explore how verbal patterns of lexicogrammar are used to signal the importance of content in Persian academic lectures. These expressions are referred to as importance markers here. 60 authentic academic lectures compiled in the Persian corpus of SOKHAN were investigated with a mixed-methods (exploratory) approach and a corpus-driven method. Analysis of the results showed that importance marking of portions of discourse can be done by making use of evaluative adjectives and metalinguistic nouns, relating the discourse to assessment, and involving the participants in the discourse. Additionally, importance marking was found to be done with one of the five structures of nominal, verbal, adjectival, adverbial, and exam-related. Among these, verbal (‘V n/clause’) and nominal (‘MN v-link n/clause’) importance markers outnumbered other patterns of importance marking. Finally, importance markers that signaled the importance of later portions of discourse were found to be more advantageous to the audience, as they made it possible for the audience to plan for online processing and note-taking of the points.

Proper management of modern organizations, managers who in addition to having high technical skills and personal, cultural and emotional intelligence as well have. This study aimed to study the relationship between cultural intelligence and achievement motivation is to executives. The purpose of investigating the correlation functional and the implementation method research - descriptive analysis. The population of managers and heads and deputies, Khorasan Razavi, Iran Mokhaberat Company. Due to the limited research using Cochran formula samples, 60 were selected. Two questionnaires to measure cultural intelligence gathering quest for success is specificity. Using correlation and multiple regression research hypotheses are tested. Our findings indicate a strong relationship between cultural intelligence and achievement motivation tetra model managers there. Also among the four dimensions of cultural intelligence, behavioral and motivational dimensions of 0. 05 showed a causal relationship with the ambition to succeed.

Academic lecturing has tuned into the major teaching method in higher education. Due to the excess of verbal and visual information presented in a lecture and the importance of some of these information in the final assessment of a course, an understanding of how unimportant information is marked in lectures is useful. The present investigation was an attempt to investigate how lecturers mark unimportant information in Persian academic lectures. More specifically, this study was aimed to investigate the discourse functions of markers of lesser importance. Based on a mixed-methods approach, markers of lesser importance were extracted from the transcripts of the 60 academic lectures of the Persian corpus of SOKHAN. The derived markers of lesser importance were then analyzed in terms of their discourse functions. Five discourse functions, including discourse organization, audience engagement, subject status, topic treatment, and relating to exam were found. In addition, topic treatment, followed by subject status, accounted for most of the discourse functions of the markers of lesser importance. Moreover, audience engagement, discourse organization, and relating to exam were found to be the least frequent discourse functions. On the whole, the findings suggested that marking lesser importance does not necessarily involves orientation to the audience or organizing the discourse into points and asides. Instead, marking lesser importance most often necessitates using expressions that explicitly or implicitly demarcate boundaries between what the lecturer wishes to talk about, does not intend to go through, or tends to cover briefly.

The purpose of this study was to investigate importance signaling in the lectures of the fields of social sciences, humanities, medical sciences and physical sciences. The study was conducted based on a corpus-driven and discourse analytic approach. The importance markers in this study were extracted from the 160 English academic lectures of the BASE corpus. The results of the study showed that in importance marking the field of study of the lectures is not an issue. The results showed that signaling importance in the academic lectures of social sciences, arts and humanities, life and medical sciences and physical sciences is done through (1) dividing the lecture into points and asides, (2) using evaluative language, (3) extensive topic coverage, (4) revealing the contents of the assessment, and (5) audience engagement. The results also indicated that the lecturers in the disciplines of life and medical sciences tend more than other lecturers to have interaction with the audience.

This paper reports on a study which explored importance marking in English academic lectures by male and female faculty members. The purpose of study was to investigate importance marking across gender. The method of study was corpus-driven, mixed-methods, and discourse analytic. Importance marking was investigated in the 160 English academic lectures of the BASE corpus. The results of the study showed that, regardless of the gender of the lecturer, importance marking takes place through (1) organizing the lecture into points and non-points, (2) using evaluative adjectives and adverbs such as important and more importantly, (3) indicating the extended coverage of topics, (4) relating the content of the lecture to exam and assessment, and (5) interaction with the audience. Additionally, it was found that importance marking does not necessarily involve using evaluative adjectives and adverbs. It can be done both explicitly and implicitly. Moreover, it was observed that orientation of the importance marker depends on its function. Finally, female lecturers were found to involve the audience more frequently than male lecturers.

This study was an attempt to explore the reading strategy use of Iranian M.A. students across three different fields of study. Eighty-two M.A. students of power engineering, physics, and communicationwere selected by a Nelson test and the reading comprehension section of a TOEFL. The reading comprehension section of the TOEFL served also as a specific task which helped participants report their strategy use. Both qualitative, think-aloud, and quantitative, SORS, procedures were used totap the participants’ use of reading strategies and to complement the findings. The results of these two procedures indicate that the use of overall, global, problem-solving, and support strategies by Iranian M.A. students was slightly different across different fields of study. Problem-solving and support strategies were the most and the least frequently used strategies, respectively. Moreover, reading strategy useof Iranian M.A. students,studying power engineering, physics, and communication was not related to their academic fields of study.

This paper was an attempt to explore the reading strategy use of Iranian M.A. students with general and discipline-related texts. More specifically, this was an endeavor to see if relation to discipline affects the reading strategy use of the students. To this end, a Nelson test and the reading comprehension section of TOEFL were used to select sixty-five power engineering and physics M.A. students at Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) to participate in the study. Given the mixed-methods nature of the study, both quantitative, Survey of Reading Strategy Use (SORS), and qualitative, think-aloud protocol, procedures were followed. The participants based their responses to SORS and the think-aloud procedure on the reading comprehension section of TOEFL test and two discipline-related reading comprehension tests. By and large, analysis of these two procedures suggested that reading strategy use did not differ significantly across general and discipline-related texts, as long as power engineering and physics students are concerned. Additionally, whereas power engineering students used strategies more frequently with general reading texts, physics students resorted to strategies more frequently with discipline-related texts.

Heat pipe is an effective device for heat transferring. Using nanofluid as working fluid can significantly increase heat pipe thermal performance. But rate of the performance improvement, is dependent on parameters of the suspended nanoparticles in nanofluid. In this article, for the first time by considering nanoparticle volume fractions and diameters as design variables and the difference between the wall temperature of evaporator and condenser and liquid pressure drop as objective functions, the heat pipe performance has optimized. The used heat pipe is a cylindrical heat pipe with nanofluid as working fluid. Heat pipe thermal performance while using nanofluid has modeled by CFD method and then GEvoM has used to relate between design variables and objective functions. Using the modified NSGAII approach, pareto front has plotted and the values of recommended optimum points has obtained by mapping method. Recommended design points unveil interesting and important optimal design principles that would not have been obtained without the use of a multi-objective optimization approach.

Heat pipe is an effective device for heat transferring that using nanofluid، which is prepared by dispersion of nanoparticles in a base fluid، is a way to enhance its thermal performance. In this work، thermal performance of a cylindrical heat pipe while using different nanofluids is simulated numerically. Three kinds of the used nanofluids are consist of aluminium oxide، copper oxide and silver nanoparticles in water base fluid. The effects of variation of the nanoparticles، particle volume fractions and the size of nanoparticles on thermal performance، pressure and velocity distribution in heat pipe are investigated and the results are compared with each other and with that of the pure water. The used nanoparticles in base fluid cause the heat pipe thermal performance to increase in comparison with pure water، such as 12. 27%، 12. 32% and 13. 26% reduction in thermal resistance and temperature gradient along the heat pipe for 3% particle volume fraction and particle diameter of 20 nm for aluminium oxide، copper oxide and silver nanoparticles are observed respectively. It is found that the particles with smaller size have more effect on temperature gradient along the heat pipe. Also optimum amount of particle volume fraction and size of particles for heat pipe performance increment are established.

Introduction. The pathophysiology of urolithiasis in infancy is not well known. The aim of this study was to investigate whether infants with urolithiasis have higher serum levels of vitamin D, as a possible risk factor for urolithiasis, compared to infants without urinary calculi. Materials and Methods. In this case-control study, 36 infants with urolithiasis (age range, 2.5 to 24 months) were enrolled as well as 36 age- and sex-matched infants without urolithiasis. Random urine samples were tested for calcium, phosphorous, oxalate, citrate, uric acid, sodium, potassium, magnesium, and creatinine levels, and also nitroprusside test was done on the samples. Serum levels of potassium, urea nitrogen, creatinine, 25-hydroxyvitamin D3, parathyroid hormone, calcium, phosphorous, and uric acid were measured in all of the infants with urolithiasis. Serum levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 were also measured in the control group. Results. Serum levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 were significantly higher in the infants with urolithiasis than in the controls (33.85 ± 14.78 ng/mL versus 18.26 ± 7.43 ng/mL, P <. 001). Nine infants in the urolithiasis group (25%) were found to have hypercalcemia; 3 of these cases also had hypervitaminosis D. Hypercalciuria was detected in 10 infants with urolithiasis (27.8%), hypocitraturia in 6 (16.7%), hypomagnesiuria in 3 (8.3%), and hyperoxaluria in 1 (2.8%). Nineteen infants with urolithiasis had at least one metabolic disorder. Conclusions. High serum levels of vitamin D may play an important role in the pathogenesis of urolithiasis in infants with hypercalcemia. We recommend evaluation of vitamin D levels in these infants

Water stress is one of the most important factors limiting growth and production of field crops in arid and semi-arid regions. One approach to increase drought tolerance in crop plants is through the symbiotic effect of the arbescular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi.. Water deficit stress is typical to semi arid environments and most of the crop plants are affected by drought, during the flowering-grain filling periods. To study the symbiotic effect of the arbescular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi On drought tolerance and some plant characteristics in sunflower, a field experiment was conducted in split plot arrangements using randomized complete blocks with four replications at the Research Field of Tarbiat Moddres University, Tehran, Iran in 2006 cropping season. Three soil available soil moisture contents; 40%(w1), 60%(w2) and 80%(w3) were assigned to main plots and two mycorrhiza species; Glomus mosseae, Glomus hoi and a non- inoculated traetment were randomized in sub- plots. Results showed that the AM fungi species significantly affected all of measured plant traits, except 1000 seed weight, number of total seed m-2, number of filled seed number per m-2 and oil content. However, water stress affected significantly all of measured traits. Water stress  mycorrhiza interaction was negligible on all studied traits except on grain yield and number of unfilled seed per m2 and oil yield. Results indicated that the highest and lowest grain yield and dry matter was obtained in available soil moisture content of 80% and inoculation with G. mosseae and non-inoculated treatrments with 1230 and 990 kg.ha-1 of grain yield and 4400 and 3180 kg.ha-1 of dry matter, respectivly. Results also revealed that different AM fungi species had significantly diffrent effect on seed yield and root colonization under different soil moisture conditions. Seed yield and seed oil content were higher in well-watered with mycorrhiza and without mycorrhiza. Micorrhiza species affected seed yield of sunflower through their effect on seed weight and filled seed number m-2 under well -watered and water stress conditions.