This paper explores the contemporary fascination with seemingly new, benign and transcendent virtual organizations. The paper extends Gerlach and Hamilton's (2000) investigations into virtuality within the genres of business restructuring and science fiction. The paper unravels a purposeful, enveloping consciousness that masks both neo-liberal fictions and post-modern fantasies dominating the v...

This study set out to examine the effect of explicit consciousness-raising of autonomous learning activities on a group of students’ General English achievement test scores following a mixed methods design. At the beginning of the study, four intact classes were selected based on their availability, of which one class was assigned to the experimental group and the others to the control groups, ...

The present study aims to investigate the relative effectiveness of different types of pragmatic instruction including two collaborative translation tasks and two structured input tasks with and without explicit pragmatic instruction on the production of apologetic utterances by low-intermediate EFL learners. One hundred and fifty university students in four experimental groups and one control ...

We will argue that this construction combines semantic and syntactic quirks that necessitate a constructional analysis. Further, we will show that specifying the pragmatic properties of the construction (and in particular the presuppositions that introduces) allows for a particularly elegant account of the construction’s distribution. This, in turn, provides further support for the sign-based v...

This paper presents an empirical study on the interplay between audio and visual information for pragmatic focus marking. Nine German speakers were instructed to read dialogues with embedded question-answer pairs and varied context regarding certainty and exhaustivity. Results show that H* accompanied by a raising of eyebrows or head occurs significantly more often for the context intended to a...

Encouraged by authors like Brenda Laurel and Janet Murray, videogame designers have been taking for granted that a high level of agency and immersion are desirable effects. However, I will show that alternative, non-Aristotelian techniques could be used to develop character-driven videogames that enhance critical thinking about ideological issues and social conflicts while keeping the experienc...

This study emerged from an awareness of the cr i t ica l role that learning plays wi th in social movements and from a belief that adult education can learn much from examin ing the learning activities of the Women ' s Movement . U s i n g a comparative approach, the similari t ies and differences between feminist consciousness ra is ing and Frei re ' s conscientization method were explored. Th...

In this study, I compared the shifts in worldview of affluent young adults participating in a course on social justice issues to a control group of similar young adults. In this course, participating students learned about the size, scope, causes and impact of world hunger and global poverty. However, an analysis of preand post-survey data revealed that the young adults participating in the soc...