This study examines the ideological content of six internationally-used ELT textbooks, three British and three American. Applying the theory and procedures of critical discourse analysis (CDA), three aspects of the conversations in the textbooks, i.e. content, relations, and positions were examined. Results suggest that in terms of content, British textbooks tend to entertain the students while...

We describe an implemented system which automatically generates and animates conversations between multiple human-like agents with appropriate and synchronized speech, intonation, facial expressions, and hand gestures. Conversations are created by a dialogue planner that produces the text as well as the intonation of the utterances. The speaker/listener relationship, the text, and the intonatio...

Reversible interactions model different scenarios, like biochemical systems and human as well as automatic negotiations. We abstract interactions via multiparty sessions enriched with named checkpoints. Computations can either go forward or roll back to some checkpoints, where possibly different choices may be taken. In this way communications can be undone and different conversations may be tr...

This note offers some observations and suggestions regarding peer review. Some of them are intended to be constructive and serious, while others are simply meant to provoke further thought and debate. Most of the ideas discussed below are not my own but came up in conversations with other people. However, since I cannot hope to recall all these people accurately and cannot be sure that they wou...

 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...

body linguistic in general and cohesion in particular have been seriously explored by many linguists since the middle of 20th century so that in fact it was considered as the essential basis for discourse analysis at next years. by looking at the subjects that were purposed in this new branch of linguistics and comparing it with linguistic researches among muslims, we may encounter some evidenc...

BACKGROUND Gestational weight gain (GWG) is an important predictor of short and long-term pregnancy outcomes for both mother and child, and women who set a GWG goal are more likely to gain within recommended ranges. Little information is available regarding potentially modifiable factors that underlie a woman's GWG goals. Our aims were to explore women's perceptions regarding factors that affec...