Unlike other areas of second language study, which are primarily concerned with acquisitional patterns of interlanguage knowledge over time, most studies in interlanguage pragmatics have focused on second language use rather than second language learning. The aim of this paper is to profile interlanguage pragmatics as an area of inquiry in second language acquisition research, by reviewing exis...

This work presents the e-Cobra architecture, an on-demand resource allocation system based on service contracts, developed to address some of the problems in the deployment and management of network based application services. The architecture supports business rules representation extracted from negotiated contracts between the involved parts (providers and customers). From these contracts, po...

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In response to the global economic crisis, organizations are cutting costs and focusing on core competencies. One natural corollary of this situation has been an increased interest in the outsourcing of IT services. Such sourcing relationships are established and maintained via formally negotiated IT service level agreements (SLAs), the goal of which is to generate utility for both parties. Und...

The study tries to explore the effectiveness of the lexical approach to improving writing in SLA. In order to find out what effects the lexical approach can have on the writing in SLA, the author conducts a teaching experiment with an experimental class and a control class. A pre-test and a post-test are used as the tools to collect the data. SPSS is used to analyze the data in the experiment. ...

This paper discusses a framework for contract-based monitoring and adaptation with respect to customers’ goals seen as an important part of Service Level Agreement (SLA) contracts. Within standard SLA contracts concepts, as mutual agreements between service providers and users, we introduce Key Goal Indicators (KGIs). These are parameters that state how well service-based processes achieve the ...

We present our experience of a three-week fieldwork in the form of a contextual inquiry with a service manager at the EPFL IT department. During these three weeks, we encounter a refusal of a user committee to sign a servicelevel agreement (SLA). We describe the context in which this refusal occurs, and we uncover our findings about the core of ITIL’s service-level management that building rela...

In this paper, we examine the problem of a single provider offering multiple types of service level agreements, and the implications thereof. In doing so, we propose a simple model for machine-readable service level agreements (SLAs) and outline specifically how these machine-readable SLAs can be constructed and injected into cloud infrastructures important for next-generation cloud systems as ...

Contrastive Analysis (= CA) In the 1940s to 1960s before the SLA field as we know it was established, Charles Fries (1945:9) wrote: "The most efficient materials are those that are based upon a scientific description of the language to be learned, carefully compared with a parallel description of the native language of the learner." Robert Lado, Linguistics Across Cultures, 1957: "Individuals t...

The orchestration of complex workflows on the Grid is emerging as a key goal for the Grid community. It is necessary for these workflows to be executed reliably, respecting any dependences; it is also desirable for the user to know (albeit approximately) when the workflow will complete. The authors argue that meeting these goals will necessitate a major shift in the underlying scheduling techno...