مطالب

Walking being the oldest form of urban transport, and until the advent of major transformations in transport technology in the nineteenth century, most cities were structured in ways that supported walkability. Today, there is a change in transportation which emphasizes, the traditional pedestrian paths which are increasingly becoming non-regulated spaces when compared to the urban spaces for automobile modes. This change in emphasis is noticeable partly because urban walkability has rarely been planned for in the past few decades and ultimately may replace our automobile dependency. It has brought enormous changes to urban landscape in recent times particularly in the developed world. Automobile dependency comes in different ways, forms and degrees. For instance, there are few cities worldwide that are absolutely automobile dependent (where driving is the only form of transport). Even areas that appear to be highly automobile dependent often have a noteworthy amount of walking, cycling and transit travel among certain groups or in certain areas, although use of these modes tends to be undercounted by conventional transportation planning. Contemporarily, reducing car dependency has been discussed broadly in the scientific community by professionals in the built environment and of course by the general public. With increasing vehicular streets worldwide, it raises a swirl of questions, how did we get to this point of automobile dependency and are the alternatives more desirable? In answering this question, this paper identified and discussed extensively thirteen major distinct trends that are responsible for the automobile dependencies in most cities of the world.

Urban space has been formed in historical texture of cities under the influence of meaning and shape on the one hand and qualities related to human behaviors on the other hand. Among these points, neighborhood centers as the most important areas of social life in urban open space play a critical role in attracting people and improving quality and vitality of environment. This study presents the related literature in an analytical approach and expresses the relationship between neighborhood centers and human presence by structure analysis; it focuses on rules governing presence quality and formed behaviors in this places. In this survey, human and his presence in neighborhood centers are evaluated and urban spaces concept is formed by composing space location characteristics and human behavior. At least, it is sated that people`spresence in urban space of neighborhood centers expresses their thoughts and cultural interactions whose form shows its function and meaning. Therefore, humans would appear in urban space in a way that neighborhood centers quality depends on activity kind and their user's behavioral patterns.

The aim of intercultural translation is to communicate. Communication is acted via verbal as well as visual means. The interaction of verbal and visual means of communication makes a set of complex situations which demand special attention in translation. One context in which the interaction of visual and verbal elements gets vital importance is children’s picture books. Color is an integral part of children's books and a visual mode of communication. For the translator, to interpret symbolic colors, cultural knowledge of the source and the target cultures is required. To see how the cultural meaning of colors can be transferred and how the interrelationship of words and colors can be achieved, Nida and De Waard’s (1986) Adaptation Theory was utilized in this study. The theory was applied to eight children’s colored picture books aimed for school-aged children. Six of the books were originally written in English and translated into Persian and two of them were the other way round. The analysis of the data showed that the required features of the above-stated theory was rarely followed by translators and illustrators, and, except in one case, color symbolism was not considered by them. Findings of the study indicate that since visuals are inseparable elements of translating children's picture books, translators/illustrators should be dressed with enough information of visual-cultural aspects of translation in general, and of color symbolism in particular.

Listening plays a significant role in daily communication and educational processes. In spite of its importance, listening has long been the neglected skill in second and foreign language acquisition, research, teaching, and assessment. However, on account of the entire challenges EFL learners encounter in classrooms due to the listening complexity, some pre-listening activities as supports in the procedure of teaching listening are proposed by experts in the field. This research investigated 80 male and female learners in 2 groups of 40, who were selected randomly, to determine whether pre-listening activities have a significant effect on listening comprehension of English texts. It also investigated whether there was a significant difference between male and female learners on pre-listening activities in terms of their effects on the comprehension of English texts. To do this, subjects first took a TOFEL test, which served as a pre-test, to make it possible to have homogeneous learners in a control group and an experimental group. In the experimental group, some pre-listening tasks, through which the learners received general prior information about the content of the listening texts, were performed. Then, they listened to and answered some multiple-choice comprehension questions which asked for the specific information in the listening texts. However, the control group’s listening comprehension tasks were destitute of pre-listening activities. The results of the analysis of the data obtained at the end of the experiment revealed that the experimental group performed significantly better than the control group. It also showed that females outperformed the male group. In other words, the treatments appeared to have a significant effect on the performance of the experimental group (and especially female learners therein) in listening comprehension.

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.