Role-plays provide students with the opportunity to demonstrate how to use English in real life situations and make them focus more on communication than on grammar. Oral presentations like conversations are a great way for students to practice their English skills. Therefore, this paper makes an attempt to investigate whether teaching conversation through role play affects the students’ speaki...

The present study, on the one hand, attempted to investigate the strategies applied in dispreferred responses by Iranian university students of English and the extent to which pragmatic transfer could occur.  On the other hand, the study aimed to probe into the association between dispreferred organization and turn-shape. To this end, 31 relevant naturally occurring conversations, totaling 120 ...

e) after 350ms wait you should produce back-channel feedback. Our model for English is the same except for some parameters: pitch level (clause a) 26th-percentile, recovery time (clause d) 800ms, and delay (clause e) 700ms. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n Back-channel feedback, also called "listener responses'~ is, to a first approximation, those responses produced by one participant which do not int...

 The present study is an attempt to investigate the use of vague expressions by intermediate EFL learners. More specifically, the current study focuses on the structures and functions of one of the most common categories of vague language, i.e. general extenders. The data include a 22-hour corpus of English-as-a-foreign-language conversations. A comparison is also made between this corpus and a...

This paper documents the use of conversational telephone speech test materials in the NIST coordinated evaluation conducted early in 2000. The primary evaluation was of General American English speech, but a subsidiary evaluation of Mandarin speech was also offered. The primary test data consisted of twenty conversations collected for the original Switchboard Corpus but not released with the pu...

despite the body of research on textbook evaluation from the discourse analysis perspective, cohesive devices have rarely been analyzed in english for specific purposes (esp) textbooks. the acquisition and use of cohesive devices is inherent to naturalistic communication, including business interactions. hence, l2 learners of business english should be exposed to these devices through cohesion-...