As far as we know humans are the only meaning-seeking species on the planet. Meaning-making is an activity that is distinctly human, a function of how the human brain is organized. The many ways in which humans conceptualize, create, and search for meaning has become a recent focus of behavioral science research on quality of life and subjective well-being. This chapter will review the recent l...

Retrieval tasks provide learners with an opportunity to focus both on meaning and on form. There are four different retrieval directions. The present study aimed to identify the optimal direction of recall type retrievals during reading and to investigate the outcomes of each one. Forty-eight intermediate EFL learners took part in the study. One of the experimental groups was provided with the ...

One skill that student teachers need to develop during their academic studies is the capacity to produce accurate and well-organized texts. This study reports on the comparative impact of metalinguistic feedback (MLF), teacher interactive feedback (TIF(, and the peer-feedback (PF) on the accuracy and organization of postgraduate ELT student teachers’ writing. The participants were 57 postgradua...

We report on a study which investigated the effects of three types of feedback realized in instructional dialogues with a computer-based language learning system for German. The interaction was framed within a directions giving task and the linguistic form in focus was the dative case in prepositional phrases. The feedback types differed with respect to the focus they put on form versus meaning...

Focus on form has received considerable attention as researchers and theorists have enthusiastically embraced an integration of meaning-focused and form-focused instruction in the L2 classroom. Therefore, the present paper is an attempt to delve deeply into elucidating different taxonomies subsumed under the specious polarization of Focus on Form (FoF) and Focus on Forms (FoFs). It then offers ...

Meaning conveyance is bottlenecked by the linguistic conventions shared among interlocutors. One possibility to convey non-conventionalized meaning is to employ known expressions in such a way that the intended meaning can be abduced from them. This, in turn, can give rise to ambiguity. We investigate this process with a focus on its use for semantic coordination and show it to be conducive to ...

This paper describes the input specification language of the WAG Sentence Generation system. The input is described in terms of Halliday’s (1978) three meaning components, ideational meaning (the propositional content to be expressed), interactional meaning (what the speaker intends the listener to do in making the utterance), and textual meaning (how the content is structured as a message, in ...

The purpose of the paper is (i) to substantiate the claim that the output of an automatic analysis should represent among other things also the hierarchy of toplc-focus articulation, and (ii) to present a general procedure for determining the toplc-focus articulation in Czech and English. (i) The following requirements on the output of an automatic analysis are significant: (a) in the output of...

Objectives: The Neuro-occupation model has been referenced as the single occupational therapy conceptual framework that considers the interaction of three underpinning variables of Intention, Meaning, and Perception that explains how occupational performance is shaped. To date, studies have focused on the qualitative relationships between the variables. Quantitative studies that focus on the re...