This study investigated Iranian English language learners’ use of circumlocution for culture-specific referents. A discourse completion test (DCT) was designed in English and Persian, consisting of items dealing with Iranian culture-specific notions and distributed among 3 groups. The Persian language group received the Persian version, whereas the English language learners, divided into high a...

The pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects of language use vary across different situations, languages, and cultures. The separation of these two facets of language use can help to map out the socio-cultural norms and conventions as well as the linguistic forms and strategies that underlie the pragmatic performance of different language speakers in a variety of target language use situatio...

Among the most innovative features of the TOEFL® Internet-based test (TOEFL iBT) are the addition of a speaking measure and a revised writing measure consisting of two writing tasks. The speaking and writing measures include both independent and integrated tasks. Independent tasks require test takers to talk or write about their personal opinions or experiences. Integrated tasks require the use...

Having pragmatic competence, one can communicate appropriately in social contexts. Pragmatic competence is defined as “the ability to use the language express a wide range of functions well interpret their illocutionary force discourse according socio-cultural context which they are used”. The present study aimed at investigating Iraqi Kurdish EFL learners through comprehension speech acts, imp...

In  this  paper,  the  authors  investigate  whether  Persians  who  have  been  exposed  to  Australian culture are still affected by their cultural norms—in particular by the politeness system taarof—in responding to compliments in an intercultural interaction.  Compliment responses  were elicited—through  a  Discourse  Completion  Task—from  thirty  participants  (five  males  and  five  fem...

Politeness is a phenomenon which is common to all cultures. Each culture has a different perception of what is polite and each language has various devices for expressing politeness. One of the important aspects of politeness which is the central focus of many studies is the polite behaviors of men and women. The focus of this study is on the politeness strategies of males and females from diff...

The purpose of the study was to examine how teacher motivational practice might influence Iranian EFL Learners’ Request and Refusal Speech Acts Production. To this end, five instruments were used to provide appropriate responses to research questions: (a) Quick Placement Test (b) the Motivational Orientation of Language Teaching classroom observation scheme, (c) the Post-Lesson Teacher Evaluati...

The present study aims to investigate the relative effectiveness of different types of pragmatic instruction including two collaborative translation tasks and two structured input tasks with and without explicit pragmatic instruction on the production of apologetic utterances by low-intermediate EFL learners. One hundred and fifty university students in four experimental groups and one control ...

The dual nature of the Japanese writing system was used to investigate two assumptions of the processing view of memory transfer: (1) that both perceptual and conceptual processing can contribute to the same memory test (mixture assumption) and (2) that both can be broken into more specific processes (subdivision assumption). Supporting the mixture assumption, a word fragment completion test ba...