The present study examined the different levels of (im)politeness strategies in expressing request, apology, and refusal speech acts across intermediate and advanced Iranian EFL learners to identify their attitudinal ratings of their produced structures in terms of pragmatic success and (im)politeness mannerism. A discourse completion test including 2 Likert scales on attitudinal appropriatenes...

It is hard to select and produce appropriate semantic formulas of apologizing for paying off violation social norms restore harmony. seems that it even harder realize such processes selection production in a non-native language. The study three folds; namely, examines the realization apology strategies by students senior Boarding School Arabic English as language, effects on contextual factors ...

This study examined how motivation for learning English, the amount of contact with English, and  length  of  residence  in  the  target language area affects Korean graduate students’ English pragmatic skills. The study attempted to account for differential pragmatic development among 50  graduate-level  Korean  students  in  relation  to  individual  factors  mentioned  above.  The  data were...

We propose a computationally-efficient variant of the shapeadaptive discrete cosine transform (SA-DCT) currently considered for MPEG-4. Although the SA-DCT complexity is acceptable for 8 8 blocks, it is very high when complete regions are processed at once. To reduce the SA-DCT complexity, we replace its 1-D DCT with a quasi-DCT algorithm and we assure that the quasi-DCT basis functions are ver...

Communicative alignment refers to adaptation to one’s communication partner. Temporal aspects of such alignment have been little explored. This paper examines temporal aspects of lexical and syntactic alignment (i.e. tendencies to use the interlocutor’s lexical items and syntactic structures) in task-oriented discourse. In particular, we investigate whether lexical and syntactic alignment incre...

The purpose of this study is to find a practical solution for improving writing skill among Iranian high school learners of EFL. The main question was whether pragmatics had any priority over traditional methods in improving writing or not.  Forty high school students were selected on the basis of their performance in PET (2009). In addition the following instruments were also used in this quas...

An individual can be identified effectively using palmprints. In this paper we propose palmprint identification based on DWT, DCT and QPCA (PIDDQ). Histogram equalization is used on palmprint to enhance contrast of an image. The DWT is applied on Histogram equalized image to generate LL, LH, HL and HH bands. The LL band is converted into DCT coefficients using DCT. QPCA is applied on DCT coeffi...

The Dot Counting Test (DCT) offers a technique for malingering detection that is less transparent than the forced-choice testing that has received so much recent attention. The present study defined six dependent variables derived from DCT responses, and examined these variables in the context of differentiating simulators from non-simulators. Four groups of subjects were studied: normal contro...