The use of discourse markers has been reported as one of the problems in crosscultural communication as well as one of the learning difficulties encountered by native speakers of Chinese and other Asian learners. However, sources of such difficulties or “ambiguity” have not been fully investigated or examined. Using elicited performance data produced by native speakers of Chinese and English re...

We present a first approach to the application of a data mining technique, Multiple Sequence Alignment, to the systematization of a polemic aspect of discourse, namely, the expression of contrast, concession, counterargument and semantically similar discursive relations. The representation of the phenomena under study is carried out by very simple techniques, mostly pattern-matching, but the re...

The purpose of this study was to probe the effect of metacognitive strategy instruction through dialogic interaction on the reading comprehension performance and metacognitive awareness of Iranian EFL learners. The data were collected through the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) and a reading test to examine changes in metacognitive awareness and reading performance before and after the inte...

The purpose of this study was to probe the effect of metacognitive strategy instruction through dialogic interaction on the reading comprehension performance and metacognitive awareness of Iranian EFL learners. The data were collected through the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) and a reading test to examine changes in metacognitive awareness and reading performance before and after the inte...

Images of reversal twist through many folklore traditions, celebrating the poor fool who becomes king and condemning the powerful to ruin. For Mikhail Bakhtin, such reversals express the creative energy of "a carnival sense of the world." In carnival, laughter and excess push aside the seriousness and the hierarchies of "official" life. Carnival shakes up the authoritative version of language a...

This investigation postulatesVygotsky’s (1978) concept of zone of proximal development (ZPD) and his related “scaffolding” metaphor as well as Norton’s (2006) principles of sociocultural identity as its theoretical foundation.Thisresearchintends to scrutinizethe socioculturally-oriented mediationalmechanisms utilized in student-student and student-teacher collaborationsin an Iranian EFL writing...

This article deals with Finnish discourse oriented word-order variations, and provides their implementation in the HPSG-style typed feature structure grammar using the LKB toolkit (Copestake, 2002). It does not present a full-coverage Finnish grammar or even a small HPSG fragment of the standard syntactic phenomena in Finnish. Rather, the aim has been to implement the Finnish discourse configur...

The present study attempted to investigate how language teacher educators evaluated two current approaches: monologic or prevalent pedagogy which is widely practiced all across the world including Iran, and dialogic pedagogy which is theoretically established by Yakubinsky, Bakhtin, and Vygotsky. The study tried to understand, whether Iranian EFL teachers and teacher educators preferred to adop...