Discourse prosody in school-aged children’s narratives was investigated to test for developmental changes in transitional prosody and to characterize the acquisition of key contrastive features for marking continuation versus completion. Spontaneous narratives were obtained from 42 children (5 to 7 years old) and 14 adult caregivers. The narratives were prosodically transcribed using a formal a...

Discourse markers improve both the quality and comprehension of a written text. This study aimed at investigating the effect of explicit and implicit instruction of formal meta-discourse markers on writ- ing skills. The quantitative data were collected from 90 upper-intermediate students at Shiraz Univer- sity Language Center. Two experimental groups went through an instruction, while the contr...

This study was an attempt to investigate Iranian and Spanish intermediate nonnative English learners’ request strategies to their faculty. To this aim, 74 (50 Iranian and 24 Spanish) nonnative English intermediate learners participated in this study. A discourse completion test (DCT) was used to elicit the request strategies used by the participants. The findings suggested the participants empl...