UNIVERSITY TEXTBOOKS, RESEARCH AND WRITING
Year:2012 | Volume:16 | Issue:26|Papers Count:8

The objective of this article is to analyze and answer two questions: "What is the appropriate textbook pattern for the endorsed Islamic economics courses? ", and "Is compiling appropriate Islamic Economics textbooks a feasible ask?" To answer these questions, the paper introduces a theoretical framework and analyses it in order to use it as a basis for presenting a pattern for Islamic economics textbooks.Then by reviewing the detailed content of an endorsed course (for instance Islamic Microeconomics I), it analytically compares this content with the proposed pattern.The major finding of this article is that the appropriate proposed pattern for Islamic economic textbooks has 9 main characteristics that have been considered in the endorsed content of Islamic Microeconomics I.

DEFINITION of expressions and words, as a source of learning, is the main and an indispensable part of academic textbooks. This research aims to apply the concepts of Text Linguistics and Halliday's Functional Theory into the description of Definition that has traditionally been studied from logical and philosophical approaches. The authors try to path the way for the systematic criticism and assessment of academic textbooks through the pathology of a sample of some definitions in such books.After describing Definition, its structure and markers, the article investigates the seven factors of text formation (cohesion, coherence, informativity, textuality, intertextuality, acceptability, and intentionality) and the seven factors of text cohesion (dependence and linking/conjunction, repetition, semantic ties, pronouns, ellipsis, and enumeration) in 70 exemplary definitions that have been randomly gathered from some academic textbooks. This study shows that definition has the structural features of a text, and introduces the most common textual and cohesive factors, the dominant information structure as well as the disordered textual and cohesive factors within the sample definitions.

The objective of this research is to study and compare the effectiveness of different structures of interpretative texts on the reading comprehension of the Islamic Azad University students. The sample group consists of 180 students from East Tehran Branch of this university who were selected through random sampling. Through a one-way factorial design, the subjects were randomly assigned into experimental groups after random sampling. The instrumentation of the study includes texts, and text comprehension questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed by applying one-way ANOVA test and post hoc analysis. The statistical analysis indicated that text paragraphing would increase comprehension.

150 years since the beginning of archeological activities In Iran, and nearly 8 decades after the establishment of archeology as an academic field of study, still archeology courses have found no appropriate applied content, so that the students of this field have to pass applied courses and perform field studies in accompaniment of the country's archeology faculties in order to gain the necessary practical, technical and professional experiences.Moreover there is no determined specification about the relation of these courses to different academic fields and horizons of human knowledge, as well as the extent of their scientific validity, reliability and abstractness. Neither, the different branches of archeology, necessary for the country, and their interdependent courses have not yet been specified. This study aims to research the development of archeology's courses and its educational resources since the establishment of the modem educational system, and upon this basis it investigates and analyzes the academic progress of this field and its fluctuations along the five periods.

The texts of Persian language and literature have been traditionally integrated to the Humanities from three aspects: Development, interpretation, and Function. Therefore, in the study of the past texts, application of other sciences is necessary.Among the different measures that have been done in this respect, we can point to the establishment of interdisciplinary fields. Studies show that though these measures were progressive, the application of concepts and methods suffers from superficial attitudes, and in the definition of the fields and courses, the quality of network connection between concepts and courses has not been properly attended to. Therefore, it is necessary to systematize such studies and programs and to fill the gap that has been caused by the over-specialization and disintegration of the sciences.The definition of new interdisciplinary curricula and syllabi in the realm of Persian language and literature has been one of the main alternatives for the development, modification and systematization of such studies. To what academic level may these curricula be assigned? What subjects should they contain? Among the different needs, which ones shall be given priority? By what structure and frame (i. e., discipline, trend or course) shall they be defined? These are the questions that have been dealt in this article and several suggestions have been proposed in this regard.

This study is a critical discourse analysis of Reader's Choice. The objectives of the research are to investigate the extent of ideological evasiveness and biases in this book, as well as to show whether the book may be suitable for being used as a textbook. To this end, four reading comprehension texts were chosen randomly from the book. These texts are: "The Midnight Visitor", "Sonar for the Blind", "Pockety Women Unite?", and "The 800 th Lifetime". The discursive structures of these texts have been studied according to Hodge and Kress's (1996) framework that consists of four features: naming, nominalization, active vs. passive sentences, and actional vs. relational sentences. The frequency of discursive structures have been measured in these texts. The results show that there was no evasive and biased structure in the book. Furthermore, according to the factors that have been focused in this study, the book proved to be a suitable textbook.

The objective of this study is to criticize Iran's university textbooks in the Field of Education and to identify their strengths and weaknesses. The research method is content analysis. The research population include all university textbooks in the field of education in Iran that are currently being used in teaching courses so that the sample includes 80 frequently-used textbooks that were selected by purposeful sampling. Data have been assessed by the checklist of academic textbook critique of the Council for The Investigation of Humanities' Texts and Books and its reliability has been estimated by content reliability method, and its stability has been estimated 88% in Cronbach alpha by its application on 20 textbooks. At the phase of criticism, each book was criticized by two specialist professors and by the integration of their ideas, the answers of the questions were extracted both quantitatively and qualitatively. The data analysis of the qualitative and quantitative parts was taken place respectively by Holsti's qualitative content analysis method, and Riffe/Lacy/Fico's quantitative content analysis method. Based on the results, the main strengths of the textbooks in form and content aspects are: their clarity and comprehensibility; application of correct grammar and editing rules; suitable equivalent-making; and application of specialized terminology. The main weaknesses of the textbooks from the same aspects (i. e. form and content) are: the existence of typographical errors; inappropriateness of cover design, print quality and binding; shortage of scientific tools; and lack of compliance with the Supreme Council of Planning syllabus.

Undoubtedly, every literary work (or every work with a literary approach) has a specific landscape which shows the author's attitude and view to the world. The author tries to scramble words and define new relationships between them. These relations result into the explanation of a mental system that is named "the triangle of conscience, outside world and writing".The objective of this article is to investigate a triangle that leads to a specific writing rather than to explain writing rules or define speech norms. Arrangement of the forms of things in author's mind is manifested through a framework of specific writing and preferral forms, and in fact it shapes his/her landscape or thought- landscape. Specialized, creative and coherent writing makes a landscape that itself represents its author's higher landscape and his/her more supreme horizon.The Substrata of Knowledge is not only a landscape (that has form and meaning), but also a thought-landscape too, because it states the quality of thought formation (sensual experience) that happens under the influence of landscape. The bjective of dealing with fundamental strata of knowledge in The Substrata of Knowledge is to achieve a fundamental understanding and to apply a common language for the identification of knowledge. And in the case of an appropriate and correct interpretation, many misunderstandings would be resolved.