Fatal familial insomnia (FFI) and a genetic form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD178) are clinically different prion disorders linked to the D178N prion protein (PrP) mutation. The disease phenotype is determined by the 129 M/V polymorphism on the mutant allele, which is thought to influence D178N PrP misfolding, leading to the formation of distinctive prion strains with specific neurotoxic pr...

PURPOSE To evaluate the validity and reliability of the Foot Function Index (FFI) in its Brazilian Portuguese version. METHODS The validity and reliability of the FFI were tested in 50 volunteers, with plantar fasciitis, metatarsalgia and chronic ankle sprain. The FFI validity process used the Short Form-36 (SF-36) and Foot and Ankle Outcome Score (FAOS) questionnaires. The correlation betwee...

This  case  study  analyzes  how  a  Taiwanese  EFL  teacher  participating  in  a  U.S.  based MATESOL program made sense of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and genre based pedagogy  in  designing  and  reflecting  on  literacy  instruction  for  EFL  learners  in  Taiwan. Using  longitudinal  ethnographic  methods,  the  findings  indicate  that  this  teacher’s conceptualization  of  g...

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...

This quasi-experimental study examines the extent to which research findings from teacher Corrective Feedbacks (CFs) and SLA concerning the efficiency of Focus-on-Form (FoF) pedagogy is transferable to the context of foreign language learning in Iranian schools. To investigate how "grammar instruction with FoF-oriented error treatment" functions as a matrix in which English  learning takes plac...

Glucose can react nonenzymatically with amino groups of proteins to form covalent Amadori products. With time these adducts undergo further rearrangements to form irreversible advanced glycosylation endproducts (AGE), which accumulate with protein age. A specific AGE, 2-(2-furoyl)-4(5)-(2-furanyl)-1H-imidazole (FFI), has been identified on proteins in vivo. We have recently shown that a macroph...

Training L2 learners’ pronunciation by using a controlled perception procedure has long been the mainstream of L2 speech pedagogy research. However, endeavors have also been done to explore more communicative teaching methods. The current study presents a paradigm that tests both communicative teaching methods’ renderings of pronunciation pedagogy and a form-focused instruction which is less us...

Framed under a cognitive approach to task-based L2 learning, this study used a pedagogical approach to investigate the effects of three vocabulary lessons (one traditional and two task-based) on acquisition of basic meanings, forms and morphological aspects of Spanish words. Quantitative analysis performed on the data suggests that the type of pedagogical approach had no impact on immediate ret...

This study investigates the impact of three types of focus-on-form instruction (FFI) on learners’ reading comprehension and their development of the English past unreal conditional. The study also investigates whether the learners’ grammar development is implicit or explicit in nature. Fifty-one intermediate-level ESL learners were distributed into three groups. Each group read passages with di...