the necessity of conducting more studies addressing the development of pragmatic profciency and strong pragmatic awareness for english language learners has made the role of instruction and feedback in teaching pragmatic knowledge of utmost importance. the present study evaluates the relative effectiveness of four types of instruction for teaching some pragmatic markers including topic change m...

Communicative alignment refers to adaptation to one’s communication partner. Temporal aspects of such alignment have been little explored. This paper examines temporal aspects of lexical and syntactic alignment (i.e. tendencies to use the interlocutor’s lexical items and syntactic structures) in task-oriented discourse. In particular, we investigate whether lexical and syntactic alignment incre...

test method facet is one of the factors which can have an influence on the test takers’ performance. the purpose of the current study was to investigate the effects of two different response types, multiple-choice cloze and multiple-choice test, on the pre-intermediate and intermediate test takers’ reading comprehension performance. to this end, 40 pre-intermediate and intermediate learners par...

The purpose of this study is to find a practical solution for improving writing skill among Iranian high school learners of EFL. The main question was whether pragmatics had any priority over traditional methods in improving writing or not.  Forty high school students were selected on the basis of their performance in PET (2009). In addition the following instruments were also used in this quas...

The prosody of a sentence (utterance) when it appears in a discourse context differs substantially from when it is uttered in isolation. This paper addresses why paragraph is a discourse unit and discourse prosody is an intrinsic part of naturally occurring speech. Higher level discourse information treats sentences, phrases and their lower level units as sub-units and layers over them; and rea...