This study investigates the degree to which referential context information influences structural ambiguity resolution preferences in non-native sentence comprehension, using both an off-line questionnaire and an on-line self-paced reading task. The critical target sentences contained prepositional phrases (PPs) modifying either the verb phrase (VP) or the preceding noun phrase (NP), as in Bill...

The use of politeness strategies can help interlocutors promote and/or maintain social harmony in telephone interactions. Using the Rapport Management Model proposed by Spencer-Oatey (2008), this study aimed primarily to reinvestigate the closing structures of telephone conversation (hereafter abbreviated as TC) in Persian and to discover the common politeness strategies used by native Persian ...

This contrastive study, in the first place, examined the generic structure and, in the second place, explored the face theory proposed by Arundale (2006) in 140 doctoral dissertation acknowledgments written by native speakers of Persian (NSP) and native speakers of English (NSE) in 7 disciplines representing soft sciences to find out what discourse genre components writers employ to articulate ...

In recent years, there has been much debate about the concept of digital natives, in particular the differences between the digital natives’ knowledge and adoption of digital technologies in informal versus formal educational contexts. This paper investigates the knowledge about educational technologies of a group of undergraduate students studying the course Introduction to eLearning at a univ...

this study compares the amount and type of direct and indirect strategies and peripheral modifications employed by persian speakers and persian language learners in the request speech act, in different contexts (concerning formality, familiarity and importance of the subject of request). a discourse completion test, as well as direct observation, was used as the main instrument for data collect...

this study aimed to examine cross-cultural differences in performing refusal of requests between persian native speakers (pnss) and english native speakers (enss) in terms of the frequency of the semantic formulas. also examined in this study was whether persian efl learners would transfer their l1 refusal patterns into the l2, and if there would be a relation between their proficiency level an...

Abstract In this article, we explored the pitch contour patterns of French discourse marker donc in realizing different pragmatic functions from native and non-native oral corpora French. Statistical analyses using generalized additive mixed modeling revealed that even though Mandarin Chinese L1 speakers learning also used cue to realize functions, their prosodic pattern is pattern. Their seeme...

In the literature students are sometimes assumed to feel empowered with respect to learning because of their familiarity with and access to ICT. However, after interviewing 25 students from post-elementary schools, it was found that the majority of the students, although they use the Internet and other ICT for school purposes, believed that their generation is not as good at learning as the pre...

For startup firms, innovation is their main modus operandi. At the organizational level, they are digital natives, birthed in the era of digital business models. Well-established, traditional businesses, however, face a unique set of challenges in introducing digital business models: how can they balance “keeping the lights on” with an existing non-digital business model while concurrently comm...