Following the “spatial turn” of the last 3 decades in humanities and social sciences and the structure of semiotic object, this research studies space as the main semiotic object of Calvino’s (1972) Invisible Cities. Significance of this application resides in examining the possibility of providing a more concrete methodology based on the integration of Zoran’s (1984) 3 vertical levels of const...

This study investigated the effectiveness of explicit pragmatic instruction on the acquisition of requests by college-level English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners in Taiwan. The goal was to determine first whether the use of explicit pragmatic instruction had a positive effect on EFL learners’ pragmatic competence. Second, the relative effectiveness of presenting pragmatics through two deli...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of two strategies of explicit teaching of economic terms on learners' vocabulary learning and retention. In the first explicit strategy, known as 'etymological elaboration', the focus was on presenting conceptual metaphors through 'identify-the-source' tasks, that is, providing the learners with the source domains underlying the metaphors,...

The current study aims at exploring the role of causativization as one of the causes stated in the literature for overpassivization of English unaccusatives in an Iranian context.The study was conducted using three data collection procedures, an Oxford Placement Test, a Grammaticality Judgment Task, and a Production Task. The results revealed that causativization errors with non-alternating una...

A non-isolated DC/DC converter with high transfer gain is proposed in this paper. The presented converter consists of the switched inductor and three-level converters. The DC/DC power converter is three-level boost converter to convert the output voltage of the DC source into two voltage sources. The main advantages of DC/DC converter are using low voltage semiconductors and high gain voltage. ...