مطالب

Keeping pace with the continuous changes and innovations in the field of English language teaching is considered to be a necessity for the quality of teachers' teaching. There are numerous approaches to teacher development, among which self-initiated development stands as one of the noticeable trends. Although teacher development is crucial for the quality of education, it appears that there are not many studies on self-development of English language teachers in Iran. There are studies mostly concentrating on the evaluation of pre- or in-service programs in English language teaching. Addressing this call, the main purpose of this study was to investigate perceptions of 48 in-service English language teachers towards their professional development. The data collection instrument used was a researcher-made questionnaire consisting of both open-ended and close-ended items. Employing descriptive statistics, the data was analyzed. The results indicated that the teachers agreed with most of the concepts that indicate the importance of professional development. Moreover, they were aware of the importance of major professional development activities for their development. Yet, peer observation and action research were not preferred as much as the other activities.

In light of the understanding that the analysis of the generic features of different academic genres can enhance the ability of non-native members of academic discourse communities to understand, and where appropriate, to produce them, the present study aimed at investigating the dominant generic structure of research articles in mathematics. To start with a relatively narrow focus, a corpus of thirty mathematics research articles were randomly selected from The Bulletin of the Iranian Mathematical Society(BIMS), and were analyzed in terms of their macro-organizational structure. An eleven-move structure was identified in the analyzed corpus, while it was also found that the research articles in the corpus did not follow the conventional Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion structure found in many other disciplines. Methods and Discussion sections which are frequently encountered in research articles of many other disciplines were missing in the analyzed articles. It is argued that the findings may have theoretical implications in revealing some discipline specific conventions of organizing macro structure. Since all the authors were Iranian, the emerging model should be treated cautiously because some aspects of the emerging macro structure may also be under the influence of culture specific conventions.

Squares as urban spaces are the arena for people formed by physical proportions and variety of functions such as religious, commercial, cultural, etc. Shohada square as a focal point in Mashhad , is one of the main arteries of access to Holly shrine of Imam رضا and makes access to utilities and major axes . According to the former urban pattern and its position in the traditional context of surrounding neighborhoods, access to the Holy shrine plays the memorial and historical role, that presents a very important position of the square. This paper clearly states that Esfahan school characteristics such as unity, diversity and balance, are an appropriate pattern for design and evaluation of urban spaces that can be used for reconstruction of old squares on historical context. The results showed that this pattern does not comply fully with Shohada square and modern architecture is visible in it. Also, serious damage has struck to the identity of the Shohada square by physical transformation with absolutely modern pattern after neglect of strong position of relation between رضوی shrine and Shohada square and religious traditional context and history. Egregious physical duality of new