The present study is an attempt to investigate the use of vague expressions by intermediate EFL learners. More specifically, the current study focuses on the structures and functions of one of the most common categories of vague language, i.e. general extenders. The data include a 22-hour corpus of English-as-a-foreign-language conversations. A comparison is also made between this corpus and a...

Whatever their role, office workers are involved in two types of activities: either they are doing some task on a predefined routine, or they are inter-acting with each-other (communicating) to deal with an exceptional situation, i.e., they have to solve a problem they or their colleagues have encountered. Traditional office computer-based tools and systems aimed to support routine work, while ...

BACKGROUND Conversations about end-of-life care remain challenging for health care providers. The tendency to delay conversations about care options represents a barrier that impedes the ability of terminally-ill patients to participate in decision-making. Family physicians with a palliative care practice are often responsible for discussing end-of-life care preferences with patients, yet there...

BACKGROUND Postgraduate medical trainees are not well prepared difficult conversations about goals of care with patients and families in the acute care clinical setting. While contextual nuances within the workplace can impact communication, research to date has largely focused on individual communication skills. Our objective was to explore contextual factors that influence conversations betwe...

In this study, 178 groups of visitors were interviewed and recorded during their visits to museums. Three clusters of elements were shown to influence learning: the identity of the visitors, their response to the learning environment, and their explanatory engagement during the visit. A structural equation model using these variables fit well. Further examination revealed that not all conversat...

This paper analyzes principles of human conversation based on the conversational goals of the participants. Several conversational rules are proposed that seem crucial to the process of interpreting and generating conversations. These rules, as well as other aspects of the conversation process, are embodied in MICS, a computer program that generates one side of a conversation. The process model...

With the ever increasing popularity of web technologies, it is very common nowadays for people to discuss events, tasks and personal experiences in social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, blogs, fora) and email. These are examples of asynchronous conversations where participants communicate with each other at different times. The huge amount of textual data generated everyday in these conversati...

In this dialogic piece we insist on the value of keeping alive critical debates about how academic knowledge is produced, when it comes to understanding complexities involved in laying bare impact socioeconomic and sociocultural differences crossing borders contexts. The climate for conversations difference constructed moved by sentiments like rage, shame, guilt, resentment but also connectedne...