Learners sometimes have incoherent and fragmented intuitive prior knowledge that is (partly) "incompatible" with the to-be-learned contents. Such knowledge in pieces can cause conceptual disorientation and cognitive overload while learning. We hypothesized that a pre-training intervention providing a generalized schema as a structuring framework for such knowledge in pieces would support (re)or...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study is to investigate the pursuit of achievement goals in medical students and to assess the relationship between achievement goals, learning strategy, and motivation. METHODS Two hundred seventy freshman and sophomore premedical students and sophomore medical school students participated in this study, which used the Achievement Goals Scale and the Self-Regulate...

This study aimed to examine cross-cultural differences in performing refusal of requests between Persian native speakers (PNSs) and English native speakers (ENSs) in terms of the frequency of the semantic formulas. Also examined in this study was whether Persian EFL learners would transfer their L1 refusal patterns into the L2, and if there would be a relation between their proficiency level an...

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) Approach claims that there are some universalities in all languages. Speech acts seem to be present in all languages, but considering this approach, research has not indicated whether request speech act differs from one language to another. Thus, this study intended to investigate whether request strategies are used differently in English and Persian roma...