Despite dramatic advances in the sophistication of tools for measuring prosodic and content channels of expression from natural speech, methodological issues have limited the simultaneous measurement of those channels for laboratory research. This is particularly unfortunate, considering the importance of emotional expression in daily living and how it can be disrupted in many psychological dis...

In this paper, we examine certain aspects of the French Accentual Phrase (AP) produced by monolingual Parisian and L2 speakers of French and discuss the implications language contact may have on our knowledge about the French prosodic system. We study the same text read by four monolingual Parisian speakers and two groups of different L2 speakers: four Central Africans and four Swiss Germans. T...

The implicit rhetorical features of academic writing which has so far eluded a comprehensive systematic characterization have made teaching it a challenging task for a large group of practitioners in academic setting. One such feature of academic writing susceptible to cultural mentalities is metadiscourse marking, which is supposed to be one of the important rhetorical aspects in the writing p...

this study was motivated by three factors, which also contribute to its significance for today’s academic writing. first, research articles are the significant means of communication between the writers all over the world. second, persuasion and organization are crucial notions in academic writing where the authors have to consider the academic audiences and their needs.  third, some writers ar...

Discourse markers improve both the quality and comprehension of a written text. This study aimed at investigating the effect of explicit and implicit instruction of formal meta-discourse markers on writ- ing skills. The quantitative data were collected from 90 upper-intermediate students at Shiraz Univer- sity Language Center. Two experimental groups went through an instruction, while the contr...