Hedging academic claims has been recognized as one of integral pragmatic features of academic writing in which most EFL academic writers seem to face substantial problems. Explicit instruction has been proposed by some scholars as an effective approach to make EFL writers aware of the importance, different forms, and pragmatic functions of hedging devices some of which are polysemous and polypr...

Purpose of study: Aims to determine product development procedures and test validity so that it meets eligibility as teaching materials.
 Methodology: The research procedure is carried out through the steps developing a 4-D model, namely define, design, development, disperse using descriptive method. This study uses model limited stage (develop).
 Main Findings: results this indicate ...

Discourse markers improve both the quality and comprehension of a written text. This study aimed at investigating the effect of explicit and implicit instruction of formal meta-discourse markers on writ- ing skills. The quantitative data were collected from 90 upper-intermediate students at Shiraz Univer- sity Language Center. Two experimental groups went through an instruction, while the contr...

The focus of this research is on how people blend knowledge gained through explicit instruction with knowledge gained through experience. The product of this work will be a cognitively plausible computational learning model which integrates instructed learning with inductive generalization from examples. The success of this model will require the attainment of both a technical and a scientific ...

Meta-discourse markers are an inevitable part of oral proficiency which improve both the quality and comprehension of learners’ speech. While studies of oral meta-discourse have been conducted since the 1980s in a European or US context, they have remained relatively untouched in Iran. Therefore, this study aimed to seek the impact of both explicit and implicit teaching of formal meta-discourse...

The purpose of the present study was to explore the effectiveness of raising Iranian learners’ pragmatic awareness of intercultural rhetoric in enhancing their L2 writing ability, complexity, and accuracy. To this end, two 25-member groups of EFL learners who were taking Basic Writing course at Islamic Azad University, Roudehen Branch, were selected based on their performance on a language prof...

Our ability to detect patterns and observe regularities is a fundamental part of reasoning and learning. Various theoretical accounts conceptualize induction in different ways. In the current study, we used the balance-scale task and mouse-tracking techniques as a means to explore the cognitive dynamics that underlie inductive pattern recognition. Although we did not replicate an expected inter...

This study involving 60 Japanese learners of English investigated the effects of various kinds of form-focused instruction on learners’ ability to comprehend and produce polite requests in English. Each treatment group received one of the following: (a) deductive instruction; (b) inductive instruction with problem-solving tasks; or (c) inductive instruction with structured input tasks. These ta...

The present study sought to investigate the effect of explicit instruction of lexical bundles (LBs) on the development of Iranian English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students’ writing quality and also their receptive and productive knowledge of Lexical Bundles (LB). Assigned to two experimental and control groups, the eighty participants took pre- and post-tests of writing tasks and the recepti...