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 a representation of the dynamics of human walking action for the purpose of person identification and classification by gait appearance. Our gait representation is based on simple features such as moments extracted from video silhouettes of human walking motion. We claim that our gait dynamics representation is rich enough for the task of recognition and classification. The...

The article is devoted to the analysis of communicative and pragmatic features German advertisements about finding a partner, language which characterized by certain changes in lexical content. Lexical units for material were selected from on dating sites or newspaper sections with age categories: 25-40 years 60 more years. concise presentation information desire present yourself positively led...

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...

Although a growing body of clinical research has begun to evaluate the efficacy and safety of t'ai chi as a therapeutic tool for a variety of health conditions, little attention has been devoted to evaluating "how" t'ai chi is scientifically studied, and the advantages or limitations of different methodological approaches. In a companion to this paper (Part I), we argued that t'ai chi is a comp...