Sharif Digital Repository

Local educational institutions produce in-house English for Specific Purpose (ESP) materials according to the curriculum policies designated and developed by the Ministry of Higher Education In Iran. To this end, this book aims to be used in the Iranian setting at the tertiary level for undergraduate students majoring in Mechanical Engineering. Moreover, the style of English usage in this ESP textbook is American.
Regarding the content of the textbook, it has both thematic organizations in which the topics are relevant and includes sufficient treatment of the target language areas necessary for the students. The principle organizing approach of this textbook is theme-based. In addition,... 

English literature has not been considered a useful teaching tool in the EFL classrooms of many non-English speaking countries. This is because teaching L2 largely has been regarded as a matter of linguistics. However, Arthur (2006, p.200) points out, "Through the use of literature, a language learning experience might become at the same time a source of immediate pleasure and satisfaction for the student. This possibility makes literature an appealing teaching device for ESL teachers". Certainly, today's English teaching can have an intimate connection to literary works. Reading literature has a vital role to play in teaching foreign language readers that English is a rich, living language,... 

Discouraging the divorce between Language teaching and language testing, dynamic assessment has changed into a strong tool not only for language assessment but also for language development and leaner involvement in the learning process. This study aimed to investigate (a) Iranian EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners' off-task self-assessment and on-task self-rating of their writing ability and the impact of a dynamic-assessment-based course on the accuracy of their self-assessment and self-rating, and (b) the interrelationships among teacher rating, self-assessment, and self-rating in the writing performance of 22 engineering students taking a writing course as part of an EAP... 

One of the most difficult aspects of learning a foreign language, particularly in an EFL context, is the retention of vocabulary. Vocabulary learning plays a major role in English language leaner's success. The standard method of presenting up to 20 or more new vocabulary words that students are expected to learn at a given time is not an effective way to help the learners develop vocabulary (Gresten and Baker, 2000). To this end, most ESL/EFL specialists often justify the use of games with reference to the motivation that they can provide for the students. Scholars suggest that many techniques, and word game is one of them. The impact of word game as a reinforcing device on improving... 

The present work aimed to investigate the frequency of occurrences and proportions of speech acts of complaints and compliments in the four volumes of the course book English Result (Elementary, Pre-intermediate, Intermediate, and Upper-intermediate), by Mark Hancock and Annie McDonald (2009), published by Oxford University Press. Investigation of the two speech act strategies was based on complaints strategies (Olshtain and Weinbach, 1987) and compliment strategies (Wolfson and Manes, 1981). It was found that the books were rich in terms of the number of the two speech acts, but in presenting them, there were one or two dominant strategies in both cases. Chi-square analysis demonstrated... 

The present paper is an attempt to evaluate Pacesetter Series (Strange and Hall, 2005), an EFL course book series, in four levels of starter, elementary, pre-intermediate, and intermediate, being currently instructed at several language institutes in Iran. The purpose of this study is to determine the appropriateness of the series in Iranian EFL contexts. Litz (2000) questionnaire was exploited to examine the series thoroughly in all essential aspects. Sixty four EFL teachers rated the series. The results of descriptive statistics indicated that there is an overall consensus among the teachers that Pacesetter rightly addresses the needs of the learners in a communicative curriculum. However,... 

Teachers' self-efficacy beliefs within a foreign language context are helpful in terms of their own conceptualization of effective language teaching. While Foreign Language (FL) literature has established a modest presence in EFL classrooms, the teachers' self-perceptions of efficacy in literature instruction strategies have gone rather unnoticed. The objectives of this study were to discover the impact of EFL teachers' gender and teaching experience on their perceived capabilities as literature instructors. To this end, 61 EFL teachers completed Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale in Literature (Mills, 2011) and background questionnaire indicating their ability in the pedagogy of literature.... 

The analysis of raters' comments on pragmatic assessment of L2 learners is among new and understudied concepts in second language studies. To shed light on this issue, the present investigation targeted important variables such as raters' criteria and rating patterns by analyzing the interlanguage pragmatic assessment process of the Iranian non-native English speaking raters (NNESRs) regarding the request speech act, while considering important factors such as raters' gender and background teaching experiences. For this purpose, 62 raters' rating scores and comments on Iranian EFL learners' requests based on six situations of specified video prompts were analyzed. The results of the content... 

Technology, as a source of instruction, has fulfilled various purposes in foreign language learning environments. During the last decade, Robot-Assisted Language Learning (RALL) has attracted teachers' and researchers' attention due to the look and feel of humanoid robots. However, in the field of pragmatics, studies highlighting the role of RALL have gone relatively unnoticed. To bridge this gap, this study sought to explore the effect of RALL on pragmatic features, including request and thanking speech acts by young Persian-speaking EFL learners. For this aim, 38 preschool children (3 to 6 year-old boys and girls) with no English learning experience were randomly assigned to the RALL (19... 

This paper presents the effect of robotics assisted language learning (RALL) on the vocabulary learning and retention of Iranian English as foreign language (EFL) junior high school students in Tehran, Iran. After taking a vocabulary pre-test, 46 beginner level female students at the age of 12, studying in their first year of junior-high participated in two groups of RALL (30 students) and non-RALL (16 students) in this study. The textbook used was the English book (Prospect-1) devised by the Iranian Ministry of Education for 7th graders, and the vocabulary taught and tested (pre-test and post-test) were taken from this book. Moreover, the treatment given by a teacher accompanied by a... 

Accurate estimation of the in-plane shear modulus of solids reinforced by nano-/micro-size elliptical multi-coated fibers is the focus of this paper. It is well-known that at the scales comparable to the nanoscopic length scales of the material, traditional theory of elasticity ceases to hold and, moreover, due to lack of consideration of such length scales has an innate weakness of sensing the size effect. Therefore, it is proposed to formulate and calculate the effective shear modulus of the nano-/micro-composite within micropolar theory which introduces two material characteristic lengths into the field equations. For this purpose, Mori-Tanaka theory is extended to treat nested... 

This study explores the effect of RALL (Robot Assisted Language Learning) on instructing greeting to young EFL (English as Foreign Language) students in Tehran, Iran. To this end, 38 preschool EFL children ranging from 3 to 6 years old were randomly assigned to the RALL (19 students) and game-based (19 students) groups, and the greeting sentences were extracted from the Functional Communication in English book [1] and ESL library website scenarios. In addition, the robot for the RALL group was used as an assistant to the teacher while for the game-based group the instruction was based on gaming methods such as command, mystery bag, and pass the ball. The instructional duration for both... 

Nanoscopic elastic behavior of the field quantities in the vicinities of nanosize defects and nano-inhomogeneities cannot be properly described within the size independent classical theory. As a remedy to this type of dilemmas and enhancement of the accuracy of the solution, polar or gradient continuum theories may be utilized. The current work is concerned with composites consisting of micropolar matrix and micropolar ellipsoidal particles with periodic distribution throughout the three dimensional space. In particular, the analytical determinations of the effective micropolar elastic moduli tensor, effective micropolar couple stress moduli tensor, and effective micropolar characteristic... 

In this paper, the whale optimization algorithm is proposed for harmonics elimination in a cascaded multilevel inverter. In selective harmonic elimination pulse width modulation, the selected low-order harmonics are eliminated by solving nonlinear equations, while the fundamental of output waveform is adjusted to a desired value. In this paper, whale optimization algorithm is applied to a 7-level cascaded H-bridge inverter to solve the equations. Also, it was validated by experimental results, since this algorithm has an ability to search in entire solution space, the probability of catching a global best solution is very high. This method has higher accuracy and probability of convergence... 

In this paper, the whale optimization algorithm is proposed for harmonics elimination in a cascaded multilevel inverter. In selective harmonic elimination pulse width modulation, the selected low-order harmonics are eliminated by solving nonlinear equations, while the fundamental of output waveform is adjusted to a desired value. In this paper, whale optimization algorithm is applied to a 7-level cascaded H-bridge inverter to solve the equations. Also, it was validated by experimental results, since this algorithm has an ability to search in entire solution space, the probability of catching a global best solution is very high. This method has higher accuracy and probability of convergence... 

Nanoscopic elastic behavior of the field quantities in the vicinities of nanosize defects and nano-inhomogeneities cannot be properly described within the size independent classical theory. As a remedy to this type of dilemmas and enhancement of the accuracy of the solution, polar or gradient continuum theories may be utilized. The current work is concerned with composites consisting of micropolar matrix and micropolar ellipsoidal particles with periodic distribution throughout the three dimensional space. In particular, the analytical determinations of the effective micropolar elastic moduli tensor, effective micropolar couple stress moduli tensor, and effective micropolar characteristic...