The production of textual forecasts by professional meteorologists is a time-constrained activity requiring the interaction of knowledge about meteorology, knowledge about language and knowledge about the conventions used to communicate the right amount of weather information to meet the needs of diverse user communities. In situations where forecasts are written manually, the time spent compos...

OBJECTIVE To assess the quality of clinical care at first clinic attendance in children with suspected epilepsy from a defined geographical population. METHOD All hospital- and community-based consultant paediatricians in Nottingham City region, UK, were asked to collaborate with a retrospective clinical audit identifying children seen between January 2001 and March 2002. The British Paediatr...

Nominalization is a very universal phenomenon in English written language as well as other languages. It has compact relations with written texts that it becomes one of important components in the formal style writing such as technical writing or legal writing. However, this does not mean that we should use as many nominalizations as possible in formal written texts. Overuse of nominalization i...

Designing a task with a reasonable level of cognitive complexity has always been important for syllabus designers, teachers, as well as researchers. This is because task manipulation may lead to different results in oral production. The present study was an attempt to explore the effect of this  manipulation  -  based  on  Robinson’s  resource-directing  model  (reasoning  demands, number of el...

In an influential paper, Béatrice Bourdin and Michel Fayol (1994; and subsequently 2000, 2002) explained, in terms of cognitive load, that low-level processes of written language production are more difficult than those involved in oral language production due to the cognitive costs of grapho-motoric and orthographic behavior. Their results were obtained with mother-tongue speakers of French, a...

In the present study, two different models of task complexity; namely, limited attentional capacity model and cognition hypothesis were examined. To this end, the manipulation of cognitive task complexity along +/- single task dimension on Iranian EFL learners’ production in terms of fluency was explored. Based on the results of the writing test of TOFEL (2004), 48 learners were selected as the...