Sharif Digital Repository

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 present study is concerned with the development of a rubric which can help to have an objective, valid, and reliable assessment of short stories and novels written by creative writing students. The 30 participants of the study who were literature and creative writing experts took part in rubric development, validation, and reliability estimation. Review of the related literature, as well as the administration of a Likert scale questionnaire and a series of unstructured interviews led to the identification of ten elements which were used to construct the first version of the creative writing rubric. To ensure validity of the developed rubric, 18 literature and creative writing experts... 

Teaching a foreign language and its culture implicitly might result in internalizing the foreign culture and identity (Brown, 2001). This might consequently cause cultural identity crisis and loss in a broader sense. As provided by Eslami Nodooshan (1998), considering the importance of cultural awareness raised through cultural studies and its influence on language policy and accordingly language classes provided the ground for this study to investigate the components of Iranian cultural identity, the degree of Iranian EFL teachers’ cultural identity, and the statistically significant difference between the Iranian EFL teachers’ cultural identity with different demographic characteristics.... 

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... 

Academic writing, being an essential part of today's academic milieu, is not mere production of different texts but is also inextricably intertwined with issues related to authorial presence and interaction. Drawing on a corpus-based approach, this study investigated how various factors namely, disciplinary conventions, writers' culture, and types of journals in which authors publish could exert influence on the use of stance and engagement markers (Hyland, 2005a) in the genre of research articles. The main corpus of this study consisted of three different sub-corpora including locally oriented corpus, internationally oriented corpus, and Native English-Speaking corpus in each of which there... 

This mixed-method study explored the intercultural competence of a group of engineering university students in Sharif University of Technology enrolling in a “Listening and Speaking” class, minoring in English. The aims of this study were first to assess the initial ICC level of the participants, second to evaluate the effect of a culture-based syllabus on ICC development of the learners, third to measure the variation of their L1 cultural identity of the students after the course, fourth to discover recursive themes in the assignments and recorded interviews with the participants and fifth to measure the learners’ satisfaction with the developed syllabus. Quantitative data was derived from... 

Intercultural Communicative Competence has been the focus of much academic inquiries in the field of second/foreign language learning in the last decades since learners’ ability to communicate authentically in the target language has been recognized among the scholars. This study aimed to address this issue in the Iranian academic environment where there was almost a gap in not touching the cultural issues of target language in a focused and organized manner in language classes at universities. For that purpose, an intercultural syllabus was designed for a 14-week course of English short story in the Minor Program at Sharif University of Technology. The syllabus was an integration of various... 

The main purpose of the study was to introduce and utilize e-Readers in teaching and testing and compare the participants’ reading performance with those of the participants using paper books. To explore the learners’ perspectives and attitudes toward the use of electronic publications, 60 upper intermediate and advanced English language learners’ experience was examined via the data which were collected through interviews on their motivation and engagement. The two phases of this study were conducted in two separate sessions with a time interval of twenty days. In order to create a description of the details of the participants’ experiences using e-Readers, a descriptive analysis of their... 

With the considerable increase in academic publications and ever-growing concern for academic writing, academic literacy, and plagiarism in recent years, investigating academic writers’ ‘authorial identity’ and ‘authorial voice’ has been of utmost importance in academic milieu. The main purposes of this study were achieved by going through five main phases including 1) hypothesizing a model of authorial identity, 2) developing and validating a questionnaire based on the model, 3) testing the model based on the questionnaire data, 4) searching for possible significant difference in authorial identity of academic writers from three different fields of English, Biology, and Engineering, and 5)... 

According to Yook and Lindemann (2012), attitudes play a significant role in motivation and in the quality and quantity of acquiring a specific language. Moreover, the worldwide spread of English demands a more rigorous focus being directed toward the attitudes of users of English in the group which Kachru (1997) has referred to as the Expanding Circle. Yet, scant attention has been devoted to the issue of World Englishes in Iran. In addition, a dearth of large-scale studies on attitudes toward different varieties of Englishes in Iran has led to deficient theoretical and methodological bases. To niche this gap, the current study tried to shed light on some dark sides of this subject by... 

English language is peppered with phrasal verbs (PhVs) and native speakers use them frequently and endlessly in daily life. However, due to various semantic and syntactic difficulties, polysemy, unpredictability, and learners’ L1 differences, this omnipresent aspect of English language morphology poses formidable challenges for learners in terms of fluency and accuracy, and leads them to resort to avoidance strategies. The problem has also been exacerbated with the arbitrariness of PhVs’ teaching methods prescribed by various textbooks. In order to shed more light on the ongoing debate over implicit and explicit types of instruction as two viable approaches to tackling PhVs, this study aimed... 

Using materials with better mechanical properties is always advantageous. Many sectors, including automotive and aerospace industries, are always seeking new materials with better mechanical properties and lower weight. A lighter vehicle means lower emission and higher fuel efficiency. Thus, developing new methods to investigate novel materials is very important. One of these novel materials are Metal Matrix NanoComposites (MMNCs). MMNCs are fabricated using nano scale particles embedded in metallic matrix. High strength, stiffness, and hardness are the three most important mechanical properties of MMNCs. Introducing a suitable way of modeling these materials is important since it will... 

Detection and classification of arrhythmia is important especially for patients in Emergency care units. Early diagnosis of cardiac arrhythmia makes it possible to choose appropriate anti arrhythmic drugs, and is thus very important for improving arrhythmia therapy. Computer-Assisted Diagnostic (CAD) Systems are used in recent decades in which extracted features and classifiers are the most important factor. In this project, we try to focus on both of these two major factors in heart arrhythmia classification using HRV signal. Therefore, in this project, we try to classify different groups of arrhythmia using HRV signal processing especially the nonlinear processing. Our main aim is to... 

Concepts and ideas of a society, formed by its discourse and ideology, are mainly manifested through language. Therefore, language has always been the subject of studies and research of many scholars such as linguists. As the languages of different countries are different, in order to transfer the thoughts of a writer, a deep examination of the source text as well as the translation of the work itself seems to be of much importance. Since translation is not an independent phenomenon and depends on the interpreter's perception, it is in relation with ideological concepts and power like the work itself. In order to be able to examine the structural effects of a work on the foundation of the... 

In the last three years, the lives of many people around the world have changed with the spread of the Corona virus. In order to better manage the consequences related to the spread of this disease, extensive research has been done on this virus, and researchers in data science and artificial intelligence have devoted a part of their research to studying the effects of this virus on the people in one or different societies.On the other hand, the study of social networks about a specific issue or trend topic, allows us to examine more closely the atmosphere that governs the society and analyze the emotions, feelings and the level of concern of the members of the society about that issue.The... 

The concurrent flow of oil and water is a common occurrence in the field of multiphase flow in different fields including petroleum industry. In oil and gas, production engineers often face a situation in which more than one phase is flowing through the producers. In such conditions an accurate assessment of pressure loss inside the well plays a vital role in efficient and effective production planning. Changes in well orientation, wellbore diameter, reservoir and fluid properties as well as fluid flow rates are among parameters in which will affect the flow patterns that can occur inside a well during its life time. These flow patterns are created as a result of a competition between... 

Casing design is one of the most expensive parts in the drilling of oil wells, and any cost reduction with the basic design of these casing strings will significantly reduce the total cost of the operation. In recent years, occurring scenarios-based casing design has become popular; Because in many cases, it eliminates non-occurring scenarios such as gas kick and saves on drilling costs. In this study, we have tried to investigate all scenarios that may occur during the lifetime of the well, whether drilling or production, and for each well, based on its own field information, possible scenarios for each casing part are selected separately and the applying loads are calculated. For this... 

This thesis represents the obstacle avoidance of a fixed-wing small aircraft using optical flow information of cameras mounted on the aircraft. The thesis consists of two main sections. In section one, the ideal optical flow has been simulated based on the camera model, complete six DOF of flight equations, and the geometry of the environment. An analytical formula has been derived to relate the obstacle detection distance to the maneuverability of the aircraft. Having the obstacle detection distance, the control and navigation algorithms have been developed to achieve a collision-free flight for the aircraft in urban canyons and junctions. The effect of some parameters such as approach...