Reading is an important skill for gaining knowledge and discovering new information in a global society. Reading competence also strongly influences a person’s learning ability. However, in building better reading skills, one of the major difficulties is an absence of background knowledge to help learners read and understand material. Background knowledge helps learners make connections to cons...

Generally, Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) rely heavily on the hand-construction and design of the domain knowledge provided for learners. In this paper we attempt to illustrate a central role that knowledge representation can play in automating crucial aspects of ITS design and implementation. We focus on the treatment of English learners’ lexical errors. Specifically, we describe a system...

Self-directed lifelong learners often intentionally look for non-formal learning opportunities. Learning Networks (LNs) provide them with an online social network to share knowledge with others. Lacking a formal social structure, the educational environment of non-formal LNs is different from formal learning settings. Thus, knowledge sharing becomes difficult because the learning environment of...

Self-directed learning often finishes with incomplete knowledge. It is also hard for learners to be aware of and reflect on the knowledge incompleteness. One promising approach to this problem is to enable them to publish their knowledge to get reviews from peers. The main issue addressed in this paper is how to facilitate knowledge publishing and peer review. This paper proposes a knowledge pu...

the purpose of this study was to examine cook’s (2003) ‘multiple competence’ by investigating backward pragmatic transfer (from l2 [english] to l1 [persian]) in refusals to invitations. it explored participants’ frequency and content of refusal strategies in l1 regarding the status (i.e., power and distance) of interlocutors and the proficiency level of efl learners. the participants were persi...

recent interaction studies havefocused on the relationship between interactional feedback and l2 development.despite the large body of knowledge in this regard, few studies have examinedlearners’ preferences for interactional feedback. besides, different findingshave been reported concerning learners’ preferences for feedback and none hasexamined the factors accounting for the variation in the ...

Online discussions provide opportunities for learners to engage in argumentative debate, but learners rarely formulate well-grounded arguments or benefit individually from participating in online discussions. Learners often do not explicitly warrant their arguments and fail to construct counterarguments (incomplete formal argumentation structure), which is hypothesized to impede individual know...

Existing research indicates that instructed learners’ L2 proficiency and their metalinguistic knowledge are moderately correlated. However, the operationalization of the construct of metalinguistic knowledge has varied somewhat across studies. Metalinguistic knowledge has typically been operationalized as learners’ ability to correct, describe, and explain L2 errors. More recently, this operati...

Cooperation scripts are a powerful means to improve collaborative learning. Scripts can be designed to support argumentative knowledge construction. However, not only externally induced cooperation scripts but also the learners’ internal scripts on argumentative knowledge construction influence argumentative processes and what kind of knowledge is acquired during collaboration. In this study, 9...