درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

One of the most important elements of public space in Stone Town of Zanzibar is the baraza. The baraza is the place where people sit, meet, talk, and even rest. In its simplest form, the baraza is a platform built in front of houses or in open public spaces. Although the baraza was brought to Stone Town from rural areas of Zanzibar in the past century, today it is a part of its identity. The main question of this research is that at the present time, given the formation of new public spaces, as well as the development of communication and social networks, what role do barazas play in the daily life of the inhabitants of Stone Town? Primary research data has been compiled through semi-structured interviews with residents, and secondary reports, articles and books have also been consulted. This research shows that in spite of lifestyle changes and the development of the media, the baraza is still an essential part of the everyday life and culture of the inhabitants of Stone Town: it is regarded as an information base, a place for entertainment, a social unit, a political platform, and a religious base.

Processability Theory (PT) is regarded as one of the prominent theory of second language acquisition (SLA) developed to illuminate the developmental sequences in SLA as well as some other linguistic phenomena (Pienemann, 1998a; 2011).Since 1990s, Processability has been at the center of attention in second language acquisition research. Within the framework of Processability theory and through analyzing the written performance of Iranian EFL learners, the present research focused on the acquisition of “Copula inversion” and “Negation” across five proficiency levels, from elementary to advanced and compared it with the stage-like development model of morpho-syntactic structures proposed by Pienemann (1998a, 2011). The study followed a descriptive method of research and the data was collected from 350 participants in five different proficiency levels from elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper-intermediate and advanced. The participants were asked to provide samples of their written performance on different tasks such as introduction task, habitual action task, story retelling task, audio-video-retelling task, picture description task, composition, communication task. The data in this research was analyzed both qualitatively, in order to identify and classify the type and order of the morpho-syntactic structures; and quantitatively, by calculating means. The results of Kruskal-Wallis test revealed that “Negation” emerged at the elementary level of the language learners’ performance and “copula inversion” emerged at the intermediate level. Just the same, the competence of the learner grows stronger in concern with these variables through the higher proficiency levels. These findings imply that PT is valid for Iranian EFL learners, as well.   

The male-female differences in burnout and its possible effect on EFL teachers’ performance has not received much attention in the literature of burnout. To address this issue, the researchers conducted this study to investigate the effect of burnout and, more specifically, its three subcomponents–Emotional, Exhaustion (EE), Depersonalization (DP), and Personal Accomplishment (PA)–on the teaching performance of male and female EFL teachers in an L2 teaching/learning context. The participants of this study were 30 (15 males and 15 females) English teachers of five private language institutes and 150 students of the same teachers. The data were collected through the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Educator Survey (MBI-ES) and Characteristics of Successful Iranian EFL Teachers Questionnaire. Multiple regression analysis, independent-samples t test and descriptive statistics were used in the data analysis process. The results showed that burnout does not influence the teachers’ performance in a significant way. Additionally, it was revealed that there was no significant difference between the levels of burnout in male and female teachers. The findings challenge the common belief that burnout can greatly affect the teachers’ performance and that female teachers are more likely to experience burnout than male teachers, revealing instead that burnout does not significantly affect the performance of teachers and there is no significant difference between male and female teachers in their levels of burnout.

Purpose- The present study aims at examining the adaptability of physical features to feeling of security among the residents of the rural area of Toos. The achievements are supposed to be used in quality improvement of rural guidance plans in line with increasing security potentials of rural areas. Design/methodology/approach- The methodology of this study is correlative, and data collection was performed through library and field studies. The extracted physical indices were obtained from the studies and rural guidance maps, while feeling of security index was obtained through 386 researcher-made questionnaires filled by the residents of 13 villages in the countryside of Mashhad in Toos rural area. The validity of the questionnaires was confirmed through an expert board and their reliability in the security feeling variable was confirmed by Cronbach alpha 0.8. SPSS software was used for data analysis. Finding- The findings of the study indicated a significant negative correlation between many of the form and morphology indices of feeling of security. The correlation between the size of the village and feeling of security is significant and equals to -0.804. Moreover, a significant inverse correlation was found between population density and feeling of security which was equal to 0.592. Among the functional status indices, we can refer to an inverse moderate correlation between the distribution of services and the scale of land uses. Accessibility index indicates a strong inverse relationship of impenetrability (with correlation coefficient of 0.670) and the design of dead-end and narrow streets with feeling of security. Research limitations/implications- The limitation of this study includes the bureaucracy of the administrative network, lack of official data and the time-consuming data collection. Practical implications- Generally, the confirmation of the strong relationship among most of the variables indicates that it is required to develop principles of secured places and to give more consideration to the physical security in rural guidance plans, which are the most important related documents in the country. Originality/value- The relationship between them has been ignored in rural areas in spite of the extended volume of rural guidance plans based on their physical context, as well as insecurity of the rural areas at the urban fringe.