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Critical Thinking (CT) which has been defined as the employment of cognitive skills or strategies for obtaining sound conclusions (Halpern, 2013) has been the subject of different Second Language (L2) studies at national and international levels. The aim of the present study was to provide a meta-analysis on the (quasi) experimental studies of critical thinking in second language education in Iran. To this end, from a total of 168 studies published between 2011 and 2020, 24 studies were selected based on the inclusion-exclusion criteria. The included studies were coded to calculate the mean effect size of the studies. The results show that 1) L2 teaching was positively effective for the CT development in Iran; 2) the most beneficial aspects of L2 teaching on CT promotion were related to teaching L2 speaking and L2 rhetorical strategies; 3) concerning L2 proficiency level, L2 instruction was most advantageous for advanced students’ CT developments; 4) regarding the age groups, L2 teaching contributed the most growth in CT levels for learners in the age group of 10-14 years, and 5) L2 teaching was most effective for the undergraduate students compared to other educational levels. The findings can be beneficial for pursuing the next moves in L2 research, education, and planning educational policies in Iran.

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The positive role of reflective teaching and well-being as means of fostering teaching quality has mainly remained at the level of speculation and there is little empirical evidence to illustrate their impact on enhancing professional development. To fill this existing gap, this study examines the contribution of reflection and psychological well-being as predictors of professional development. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, 350 English language teachers were selected randomly and participated in a survey. Following that, six teachers through purposeful sampling participated in a focus group interview to investigate the relationship among the aforementioned variables. The correlational analysis confirmed the positive relationship among these three constructs and a structural equation modeling indicated that both reflection and well-being significantly predicted professional development; however, well-being was a stronger predictor compared to reflection. The qualitative analysis of data revealed four main themes contributing to professional development among teachers. The pedagogical implications are also elaborated and discussed.

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The incorporation of applied games in university differentiated language instruction is increasingly prevalent. This interventional study was conducted through non-crossover design in the academic years 2020-2021 among the students of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences. The quantitative and qualitative data were gathered by soliciting participants' attitudes towards English for Specific Purposes writing through (game)-based differentiated instruction, assessing their academic and professional writing, and debriefing their insight into how differentiated instruction might enhance English for Specific Purposes writing. While the quantitative data were analyzed through Wilcoxon signed-rank test and repeated measures ANOVA, the qualitative data were content analyzed through theme-based analysis. It was revealed that mixed reality harnessed the synergy of augmented reality and virtual reality in English for Specific writing education. Findings showed that single-minded preoccupation with a game type undermines the potential of game-based differentiated instruction in English for Specific Purposes writing. The results and implications are explained.

 

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The representation of future pre-configuration through policy-making processes has been an in-vogue area of study in the field of discourse analysis. Equally important is the reconstruction of future pre-configuration in the institutional translations of political text and talk. The objective of this study is to investigate the conceptualization of futurity in the preemptive policy-making in the speeches of the Iranian Supreme Leader and their English institutional translations. The data for the present study comes from 20 speeches of the Iranian Supreme Leader and their translations, spanning from 2015-2020, issued by the Office of the Supreme Leader. We employed semantic-syntactic analytical tools such as mood, modality, and aspect to study the conceptualization of futurity in the policy discourse. In conclusion, the findings of the study indicate that these reconstruction of futurity in the preemptive policy-making process in the English institutional translations are to a greater extent similar to the semantic-syntactic properties of the original texts. However, modalization and mood transformation are instances of differences between original and translated versions of texts. Besides, we argued that any instance of the occurrence of similarity or differences stems from on-line dialectic relationships between micro-pragmatic and macro-pragmatic factors

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Decision-making in competitive situations is a challenge for managers. Identifying the strategic success factors (SSF) for each company and  determining the company’s position relative to its competitors due to the SSF are critical, which top managers use for survival in the competitive conditions. The aim of this paper is to create a quantitative method to determine the competitive benchmarking. In this study, average cost of production, company's brand equity, product quality, marketing and sales capabilities, purchasing capabilities, customer satisfaction, production flexibility, engineering capabilities, technical research capabilities, and the number of  R & D projects were identified as critical success factors by the experts of Profile and Pipe Steel Industry. The technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution was used to determine the positive benchmark (as positive ideal solution) and negative benchmark (as negative ideal solution). Then by considering the budget constraint, binary goal programming model was used to maximize the positive deviation between each rival and the negative benchmark, and to minimize the negative deviation between each rival and the positive benchmark. The results of the proposed model showed that which SSF rival should be considered to reach the positive benchmark.   Keywords:  

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Aims: Human herpes virus 6 (HHV-6) is a ubiquitous virus with a high rate of prevalence worldwide. In recent years, a new form of the virus genome has been identified called Chromosomally integrated HHV-6 (ciHHV-6). Further studies are required to elucidate the relation between ciHHV-6 and other clinical complications. The purpose of this study was to summarize the literature on different clinical aspects of the ciHHV-6 integration and its prevalevce in different communities.
Materials and methods: Search keywords include HHV-6, integrated genome, telomeric regions and integrated HHV-6. Scientific databases such as scopus, PubMed and google scholar with no specified start date were used for information collection.
Findings: About 1% of global populations are infected with ciHHV-6. Real-time PCR can be used to differentiate between ciHHV-6 and HHV-6 acute infection in which the viral load will be higher in ciHHV-6 compared to the acute infection. However, ciHHV-6 can be confirmed by evidence of one copy of viral DNA in hair or nail follicles. It has been shown that ciHHV-6 may disrupt the telomer stability.
Conclutions: To date, no treatment has been discovered to remove the viral genome from the host cells. Taken together, the integrated form of the HHV-6 genome could be linked to the various diseases, including heart and autoimmune diseases. But further studies are needed to find its association with other diseases in different geographic area.

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As a new shift in the ELT field, critical pedagogy (CP) originated from Freirean philosophy. It aims at raising both teachers and learners’ awareness towards the instrumental view of ELT and its superficial neutrality. Despite the recent growth of CP in Iran, it is unknown whether or not CP is supported and practiced in the teacher development process of Iranian universities. Moreover, to the best of the researchers’ knowledge, an appropriate questionnaire dealing with such a concept has not been developed yet. The present study, therefore, aimed at developing and validating a CP-oriented scale to be used in ELT education system in Iran. To validate this instrument, 150 EFL teachers and students from three universities of Iran were selected through convenience sampling. The researchers employed exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The results indicated an acceptable level of internal consistency and satisfactory construct validity. This measure can be helpful for those who support practicalizing CP tenets in the field of ELT, in general and in teacher development process, in particular.