This investigation examined how age and test condition affect one's ability to comprehend discourse passages, and determined whether age and test condition affect discourse comprehension and closed-set sentence recognition in a similar way. Young and older adults were tested with closed-set sentences from the newly-created build-a-sentence test (BAS) and a series of discourse passages in two au...

It was brought to my attention that there are problems related to the recently published article “Evidence of Coal-Fly-Ash Toxic Chemical Geoengineering in the Troposphere: Consequences for Public Health” [1]. Together with the Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Franck Vazquez, and the Editorial office, we re-evaluated the paper, re-assessed the comments made by the three reviewers and note the foll...

Communicative competence has been the goal teaching of a second or foreign language. In acquiring language, speakers language also acquire rules knowledge and choose speech acts when communicating with others. This study aimed to investigate act request strategies perspectives produced by student The International Institute Tourism Business Denpasar. There are fifty students’ involved in interm...

This paper describes the submitted English shallow discourse parsing system from the natural language processing (NLP) group of Soochow university (SoNLP-DP) to the CoNLL-2016 shared task. Our System classifies discourse relations into explicit and non-explicit relations and uses a pipeline platform to conduct every subtask to form an end-to-end shallow discourse parser in the Penn Discourse Tr...

The task of implicit discourse relation classification has received increased attention in recent years, including two CoNNL shared tasks on the topic. Existing machine learning models for the task train on sections 2-21 of the PDTB and test on section 23, which includes a total of 761 implicit discourse relations. In this paper, we’d like to make a methodological point, arguing that the standa...

Recent  research  in  interlanguage  pragmatics  (ILP)  has  substantiated  that  some  aspects  of pragmatics are amenable to instruction in the second or foreign language classroom. However, there  are  still  controversies  over  the  most  conducive  teaching  approaches  and  the  required materials.  Therefore,  this  study  aims  to  investigate  the  relative  effectiveness  of  conscio...

Following Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss-Weltz’s (1990) classification, this study examines the relationship between power and gender of the addressees and the type and number of refusal strategies employed by Sarawani Baloch male university students (SBMUS). Fifty SBMUS studying in Azad University of Sarawan were randomly chosen as the participants of the study. Data collection was accomplished t...

 Second language  learners often develop grammatical competence in the absence of concomitant pragmatic competence (Kasper & Roever, 2005) and the exact nature of the relationship between the two competences is still indistinct and in need of inquiries ( Bardovi-Harlig, 1999; Khatib & Ahmadisafa, 2011). This study is a partial attempt to address the lacuna and aims to see if any relationship ca...