this study investigated the effectiveness of explicit pragmatic instruction on the acquisition of requests by college-level english as foreign language (efl) learners in taiwan. the goal was to determine first whether the use of explicit pragmatic instruction had a positive effect on efl learners’ pragmatic competence. second, the relative effectiveness of presenting pragmatics through two deli...

pragmatic assessment and consistency in rating are among the subject matters which are still in need of more profound investigations. the importance of the issue is highlighted when remembering that inconsistency in ratings would surely damage the test fairness issue in assessment and lead to much diversity in ratings. our principal concern in this study was observing the criteria that american...

This paper describes some computational strategies employed in the implementation of the model outlined in papers by Ladd and Ladd & Monaghan in this volume. There are two main categories of problern involved in extracting intonation from text: the first derives from the (currently) very limited nature of higher-level information deducible from text; the secend consists of prpblems of interpret...

1 Efficient natural language generation has been successfully demonstrated using highly compiled knowledge about speech acts and their related social actions. A design and prototype implementation of a parser which utilizes this same pragmatic knowledge to efficiently guide parsing is presented. Such guidance is shown to prune the search space and thus avoid needless processing of pragmatically...

Despite the general findings that address the positive contribution of teaching pragmatic features to interlanguage pragmatic development, the question as to the most effective method is far from being resolved. Moreover, the potential of literature as a means of introducing learners into the social practices and norms of the target culture, which underlie the pragmatic competence, has not been...

BACKGROUND To impact on the obesity epidemic, interventions that prevent weight gain across populations are urgently needed. However, even the most efficacious interventions will have little impact on obesity prevention unless they are successfully implemented in diverse populations and settings. Implementation research takes isolated efficacy studies into practice and policy and is particularl...

This paper presents an open-domain textual Question-Answering system that uses several feedback loops to enhance its performance. These feedback loops combine in a new way statistical results with syntactic, semantic or pragmatic information derived from texts and lexical databases. The paper presents the contribution of each feedback loop to the overall performance of 76% human-assessed precis...