English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in Captivity: The case of Iranian prisoners of war in the Iraq-Iran war

During the Persian Gulf War of Iraq-Iran (1980-1988), thousands of Iranians were taken captive by Iraqi troops. These prisoners of war (POWs) had to find ways to enrich and fill their time in prison camps. Learning English was one such activity. This study was carried out to appraise the motivations of the Iranian POWs for learning English, and to understand more about their textbooks, their classroom environment, the teaching methods and techniques employed, the skills emphasized, the teaching aids improvised, the types of exercises mobilized, as well as the test-taking techniques adopted. A relevant corpus of 21 memoirs and 7 interviews with Iranian ex-POWs were analyzed. The research draws upon Maslow’s (1970) “self-actualization” and Frankl’s (1984) “logotherapy” to shed light on the existential aspect of learning. Findings revealed that for these EFL learners, learning English was an attempt to fulfill their potential and/or to make life more meaningful

Zero-branes and the symplectic hypermultiplets

We study the scalar fields of the five-dimensional N=2 hypermultiplets using the method of symplectic covariance developed in previous work. For static spherically symmetric backgrounds, we show that exactly two possibilities exist. One of them is a Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfeld (BPS) zero-brane carrying charge under the hypermultiplets. We find an explicitly symplectic solution of the fields in this background and derive the conditions required for a full spacetime understanding

Five dimensional 2-branes and the universal hypermultiplet

We present a discussion of black 2-branes coupled to the fields of the universal hypermultiplet of ungauged N=2 supergravity theory in five dimensions. Using a general ansatz dependent on a spherically symmetric harmonic function, we show that there are exactly two such solutions, both of which can be thought of as arising from the dimensional reduction of either M2- or M5-branes over special Lagrangian cycles of a Calabi-Yau 3-fold, confirming previous results. By relaxing some of the constraints on the ansatz, we proceed to find a more general solution carrying both M-brane charges and discuss its properties, as well as its relationship to Euclidean instantons.Comment: In v2 the paper was completely rewritten, errors fixed and notation improved. To appear in Nuclear Physics