the present study aims at investigating the effect of different levels of lexical collocational density on efl learners’ reading comprehension. eighty sophomore students with different levels of proficiency studying at  zand institute of higher education in shiraz, iran were chosen from among eighty five learners based on their score distribution on a reduced toefl test constructed by education...

The present study examined email communication practices of two groups of students in Iran and the United States to uncover the probable differences between Iranian and American email communication norms. The study also aimed at investigating how power distance in academic centers influences students’ choices of communication strategies in email writing. The use of two politeness strategies nam...

We developed a cooperative time-sensitive task to study vocal expression of politeness and efficiency. Sixteen dyads completed 20 trials of the ‘Maze Task’, where one participant (the ‘navigator’) gave oral instructions (mainly ‘up’, ‘down’, left’, ‘right’) for the other (the ‘pilot’) to follow. For half of the trials, navigators were instructed to be polite, and for the other half to be effici...

In order to build embodied conversational agents that are able to communicate with the user in a more natural manner, the consideration of social aspects seems inevitable. One aspect of social interaction is the use of politeness strategies. In this paper, we report on a corpus study we conducted in order to shed light on the co-occurrence of gestures and verbal politeness strategies in face th...

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Patterns of Politeness in Teacher-Student Interaction: Investigating an Academic Context AbstractThis study investigated politeness strategies used in instructor-student relationships, in an academic environment. To conduct the study, four university classes with different instructors were randomly selected, observed and analyzed. Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness was drawn on as the an...

“Get lost!” or “I think you should leave now” or “Ok, perhaps I’ll see you around some other time”, humans seem to be expressing things differently in different situations based on various factors: Social relationship between the two people, urgency of an action, their personality, etc. Social interaction of synthetic agents appears believable when it has at least some characteristics of human-...