Concerns over the phony nature of textbooks and artificiality of their contents in reflecting authentic language have been raised by a number of researchers. It has been argued that many language teaching programs result in the failure of learners of English to successfully communicate in the target language. The problem with these programs is that there is no general agreement about the succ...

Learners sometimes have incoherent and fragmented intuitive prior knowledge that is (partly) "incompatible" with the to-be-learned contents. Such knowledge in pieces can cause conceptual disorientation and cognitive overload while learning. We hypothesized that a pre-training intervention providing a generalized schema as a structuring framework for such knowledge in pieces would support (re)or...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study is to investigate the pursuit of achievement goals in medical students and to assess the relationship between achievement goals, learning strategy, and motivation. METHODS Two hundred seventy freshman and sophomore premedical students and sophomore medical school students participated in this study, which used the Achievement Goals Scale and the Self-Regulate...

In this paper we consider a network with interactions by two users. Each of them repeatedly issues download requests on the network. These requests may be unsuccessful due to congestion or non-congestion related errors. A user decides when to cancel a request (that is, what his impatience threshold is) and how long to wait before reissuing his request after cancellation of the previous request ...

This study was designed to explore the issue of request strategies in the Chinese setting by establishing a corpus of vedio clips of contemporary Chinese teledramas on the basis of an overview of previous studies on Chinese request strategies. In the present study, we chose 3970 short sequences of video clips from 35 Chinese teledramas which vividly describe the Chinese people’s life in the con...