BACKGROUND Controlled clinical trials of health care interventions are either explanatory or pragmatic. Explanatory trials test whether an intervention is efficacious; that is, whether it can have a beneficial effect in an ideal situation. Pragmatic trials measure effectiveness; they measure the degree of beneficial effect in real clinical practice. In pragmatic trials, a balance between extern...

The main idea of contrastive analysis, as propounded by Robert Lado in his book Linguistics Across Cultures (1957), was that it is possible to identify the areas of difficulty a particular foreign language will present for native speakers of another language by systematically comparing the two languages and cultures. Where the two languages and cultures are similar, learning difficulties will n...

This paper propo~s a reversible architecture to handle not orily syntactic and semantic information but also pragmatic information. • I Existing architectures cannot represent pragmatic informatioil explicitly, and lack reasoning capability;given insufficient information. I argue that the techniques of plan representation and approximate reasoning are, in the enhanced argumentation system propo...

Interlanguage-links (ILLs) among Wikipedias are one of important multilingual resources. In this paper, we describe analysis results of ILLs in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English (CJKE) Wikipedias, and propose a cross-lingual keyword navigation system using ILLs. From analysis of ILLs, we found five patterns of ILLs. An overview of analysis results and the system are described.

One of the theories accounting for pragmatic development of L2 learners is Vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural  theory.  This  study  investigated  the  development  of  EFL  learners'  pragmatic competence through the lens of an important concept of Vygotsky’s theory, i.e.  the  zone  of proximal  development.  The  study  was  conducted  to  answer  two  questions.  The  first  question was wheth...

Veryfew attempts have been made in the past to develop instruments to measure pragmatic knowledge of second language (L2) learners. The absence of such instruments in the literature of English language teaching (ELT) underscores the need for the researchers to develop new tests that are specifically designed to assess this crucial but less explored aspect of language learners’ (LLs) knowledge. ...

A potentially fruitful area for applied linguistic research is the nature of the linguistic systems used by second language learners as they learn--or even after they appear to have stopped learning. It has been suggested at various times that the findings of this sort of research would be useful not only to language teachers and textbook writers, but also to our understanding of language conta...

This paper presents one of the linguistic resources developed in the scope of the ONOMASTICA European project. In terms of size, the interlanguage pronunciation lexicon represents a very small fraction of the global lexicon produced by the project. The interest of this research tool, however, derives from its particular contents: 1; 000 names from each of the 11 languages represented in the con...