Focused ethnography is an applied and pragmatic form of ethnography that explores a specific social phenomenon as it occurs in everyday life. Based on the literature a problem-focused research question is formulated before the data collection. The data generation process targets key informants and situations so that relevant results on the pre-defined topic can be obtained within a relatively s...

Ultrasound (US) thermotherapy is used to treat tumours, located deep in human tissue, by heat. It features by the application of high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU), high local temperatures of about 90 degrees C and short treating time of a few seconds. Dosage of the therapy remains a problem. To get it under control, one has to know the heat source, i.e. the amount of absorbed US power, w...

Although explicit and implicit knowledge of language learners are essential to theoretical and pedagogical debates in second language acquisition (SLA), little research has addressed the effects of instructional interventions on the two knowledge types (R. Ellis, 2005).This study examined the relative effectiveness of explicit and implicit types of form-focused instruction (FFI) on the acquisit...

This research explores the effects of three computer-mediated feedback modalities, that is, elicitation, recast, and meta-linguistics, on the learning of English participial, gerund, and infinitival phrases among Iranian intermediate-level EFL learners. The overriding focus of the present study was to investigate whether different types of feedback given through form-focused computer-human exch...

Map reading is unique to humans but present in people of diverse cultures, at ages as young as 4 years. Here we explore the nature and sources of this ability, asking both what geometric information young children use in maps and what non-symbolic systems are associated with their map-reading performance. Four-year-old children were given two tests of map-based navigation (placing an object wit...

This study set out to explore whether different input enhancement tasks as implicit instruction techniques had any significant impact on the intake of causative verbs in English as a foreign language among Iranian EFL learners. For this purpose, three intact classes consisting of 75 male and female intermediate L2 learners were randomly divided into three conditions: simultaneous grammar consci...