درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

This paper is an empirical attempt to investigate bilateral trade flow between Iran and Russia. To this end, we used statistical analyses on macroeconomic series over the period of 1991-2017. Results revealed that there is a significant statistical difference in terms of exports between Iran and Russia, and that there has always been a buyer-seller dialogue between the two countries. According to the Export-Import Similarities (EIS), Iran and Russia represented low potential complementarity between the years 2001 and 2017, which indicated that there is more trade competitiveness rather than trade complementarities between the two countries. Results from the statistical tests of Friedman and Kruskal-W revealed that the service sector has played an important role in creating value in Russia’s economy. In addition, there is a statistical significant difference with respect to Iran’s exports to Russia in terms of Iran and Russia’s sanctions and Russia’s membership to WTO. During the sanctions imposed by the West, when Russia and Iran’s GDP always decreases, they find each other as regional allies and try to strengthen their bilateral economic relationship. However, there is an obvious lack of diversity in Russian and Iranian export supplies and the volume of bilateral trade between them is not expected to increase in the future. Russia and Iran have failed to establish adequate economic, technical and educational ties and there is no active economic diplomacy between them. As a result, developing a clear program for the promotion of bilateral trade is a strategic priority, which must be operationalized by politicians.

The present study aimed to investigate the effect of learning context on the acquisition of plurality agreement in English noun phrases by Iranian L3 learners of English. To this end, 64 elementary learners of English were chosen from among the students of Arabic language and literature and Persian language and literature of Ahvaz university and Yazd university via the Oxford Quick Placement test. The participants were assigned to four groups to be compared in terms of the comprehension and production of plurality agreement via a grammaticality judgment correction task and a picture description task. The first and the second groups had Persian as their first language (L1) and Arabic as their second language (L2) but differed from each other concerning their language of contact instruction, Persian and Arabic, respectively. The third and fourth groups had Arabic as the L1 and Persian as the L2 but differed from each other concerning their language of contact instruction, Persian and Arabic, respectively. The results showed that the groups which had Arabic as their language of contact instruction outperformed the other groups in both tasks, which suggests that they transferred plurality agreement facilitatively from Arabic, which was their language of contact instruction. Therefore, the results of this study suggest that the context of learning matters in the acquisition of L3 properties since the L3 learners associate their language of contact instruction with the L3 in their mind due to the similarities in the learning context.