Sharif Digital Repository

Women are going to play more important roles in the economy of most countries including Iran. Hence, since the number of entrepreneurs among women is increasing, identifying characteristics and other factors that cause these group to be successful, is a critical issue. Studies show that entrepreneurs, especially women entrepreneurs, face numerous problems in their career. These problems are especially more demanding in societies with unique cultural attributes. Therefore, applying personal and managerial solutions in order to overcome these problems are necessary. On the other hand, researchers believe that one of the most effective and beneficial concepts helping entrepreneurs in their... 

Improving the performance of compressors plays a key role in saving energy in industries. The presence of aleatory and epistemic uncertainties, such as dimensional, geometrical and environmental uncertainties, causes the tolerances that are within the allowed ranges in normal assembly conditions to violate the assembly requirements in operational conditions and cause a drop in compressor efficiency. In order to reach the dimensional and geometrical tolerances of the components of a compressor, especially in the design of the rotor and stator blades, that guarantees the optimal and stable performance while not increasi the production costs, there is a need for an optimal and robust tolerance... 

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a network management approach that allows centralized control of the network independently from network hardware. As a network management method, SDN provides many capabilities not traditionally found in existing hardware-based networks. However, one of the significant challenges of SDN is the placement of the controller within the network. In SDN, the central controller must be able to efficiently route all data flows separately to end devices. Therefore, the placement of the controller in the network is crucial. However, controller placement in the network poses a major challenge as it needs to be appropriately and optimally positioned to enhance... 

Among different subfields of pragmatics some have been analyzed meticulously and some seem to be in a more stringent need of investigation. ILP rating is a novel branch of pragmatics studies through which various aspects and process of rating the L2 learners’ pragmatics knowledge are analyzed. Unfortunately, despite its great impact on learning and teaching second language, investigation of L2 raters’ behaviors and criteria has not been explored much. Problems in the process of ILP rating are very critical, as they can easily undermine the fairness of the test. Therefore, this study attempted to analyze overall 100 EFL teachers’ rating criteria (50 Iranian nonnative and 50 American native)... 

Conveying a successful message within a language profoundly stems from not only a linguistically appropriate utterance, but also a pragmatically appropriate discourse too. Broadly considering various facets of pragmatics, pragmatic assessment has not been potentially brought into perspective, and, as a result, the literature deserves more comprehensive attention. This study, guided by the principles of mixed methods design, pursued three purposes: to inspect the matches and mismatches, to explore rating variations, and to assess the rater consistency between the holistic and analytic rating methods of agreement and disagreement speech acts in L2 by non-native English teachers. To address... 

Vocabulary knowledge is one of the main building blocks in the process of learning a new language and presents many challenges to language learners. Using computer software and online programs is suggested as possible approaches for overcoming some of these challenges. In the present study, the researcher attempted to study the effect of creating and sharing different sets of online flash cards on the use of vocabulary items among Iranian English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students. Thirty-nine university students in two groups participated in this study (29 males, 10 females). One group were instructed to create online flash cards containing the definitions of words and their synonyms and... 

In this millennium there has been a thought-provoking dispute over the inclusion of Critical Thinking (CT) programs into teaching syllabi; this inspiring challenge of change has led researcher to investigate the teachability and transferability of Critical Thinking. Thus, this study investigated whether explicit critical thinking instruction can foster critical thinking skills of in-service EFL teachers and enhance their disposition, perception and attitude. To fulfill the purposes of this study, California Critical Thinking Skill Tests (CCTST), EMI Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory, as well as perception and attitude questionnaires were utilized. The participants of this research were... 

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... 

Developing ESP knowledge of a specific academic discipline is not only a privilege but a prerequisite for successful performance in related academic and occupational settings. English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses at undergraduate level in Iranian universities are designed to serve this purpose. Needs analysis is the foremost step to design relevant and useful ESP courses, but how to approach needs in a motivating and interesting way is still a question pending further research. Accordingly, focusing on engineering fields in three Iranian state universities, this study aimed at identifying factors that affect engineering students’ motivation for learning technical English in ESP... 

It is generally observed that the textbooks employed in the classrooms play a crucial role in the process of teaching and learning a second/foreign language. As a result, a number of studies have been carried out to evaluate English Language Teaching (ELT) materials. Trying to contribute to this growing body of literature, the present study was conducted to evaluate the eight most popular global textbooks which are taught in Iranian ELT institutes in terms of their task types according to Nunan’s (1999) classification of the tasks. Nunan (1999) classified tasks into different groups according to the strategies underpinning them. He divided tasks into five major groups each one consisting...