محمد غفوری

Learning outcomes will highly increase if barriers are identified and removed appropriately. Since demotivating factors can affect the learning process negatively, regaining the lost interest of learners leads to higher levels of academic achievement. Demotivation has been referred to as low motivation instead of being an independent concept on its own on the one hand, and the demotivating factors related to PhD exam candidates have not been taken into consideration so far on the other hand. As a result, this research attempted to examine both the demotivating and remotivating factors in the Iranian milieu, for which 100 MA and 78 PhD exam candidates from various universities took part in our study. The participants filled out a validated demotivating questionnaire for data collection, and 15 MA and 20 PhD participants participated in a semi-structured interview, encompassing five open-ended questions. The multivariate analysis of ANOVA depicted a significant difference between the most demotivating factor (economic problems) and the least demotivating one (curriculum decisions). Moreover, the data provided by the participants were analyzed to reduce the effect of these factors. Identifying the demotivating factors and trying to neutralize their negative effects by considering the remotivating options enables the policymakers to help the students move towards academic satisfaction which in the long run leads to their psychological well-being.

With the global spread of English as the lingua franca for academic publishing, non-native researchers and university students are constantly facing linguistic barriers including insufficient vocabulary knowledge in writing for publication. This persistent need motivated the development of a good number of corpus-based word lists for frequently used academic and technical words in research articles across disciplines. Nevertheless, despite its importance in corpus-based study of language for word list development, replication research has received far less attention in this line of inquiry. The current study aimed to address this gap and replicated two published studies that investigated the use of academic vocabulary in applied linguistics research articles. To this end, research articles published from 2010 to 2020 in 20 well-known journals in the field were collected, and a corpus with around 48 million words was compiled and analyzed. The findings indicated that academic vocabulary accounted for 11.46% of the corpus, which is similar and close to the reported coverage of the AWL in replicated studies. However, regarding the frequently occurring academic and non-academic content words, the findings showed considerable variation with respect to the results reported earlier. In light of these findings, the study highlighted the importance of replication research to test the reliability of corpus-based vocabulary studies that developed field-specific academic word lists. Finally, the study developed an updated version for applied linguistics academic word list, that might be regarded as a resource and guide for the vocabulary learning component of the relevant EAP programs in the field.

Study of natural hazards can be a useful tool in decision-making, planning and prioritization of measures to manage the crisis. In this research, the details of this approach in Astaneh Ashrafieh district in northern Iran in Gilan Province were evaluated and described given the history of liquefaction in the earthquake in Rudbar and Manjil in 1990. According to GSI maps of Sefidrud delta sediments in which Astaneh Ashrafieh area is located, the area from Paykouh to the beach mostly belongs to the Quaternary. At the delta level, there are three stratigraphic units related to the Pleistocene and five units related to the Holocene. In this study, more than 50 boreholes were drilled and a borehole for analysis was analyzed at the most critical parts of the region. Type of drilling in the study was machine-rotating and continuous sampling was conducted to a depth of 18 meters at a depth. Underground water level for this purpose was 3 meters and using experiments, research work began on the sand of the area, sand of the area was tested by ​​field and laboratory studies such as on-site testing, grading test, and chemical and mineralogical tests. Based on the tests, sediments were mainly made of plagioclase, clinopyroxene and epidote minerals, a little quartz and carbonate debris and contained circular and semi-circular particulars and a small amount of clay and in some areas, silt in the surface layers.