Sensitization to the house dust mite (Dermataphagoides pteronyssinus) (HDM) is the most common risk factor associated with the development of asthma in adults and children. The effectiveness of HDM control measures in the treatment of asthma is not yet proven. The strategies for control for avoidance depend on our understanding of the biology of the HDM. The evidence suggests a favorable effect...

In naturally occurring discourse, much that is meant to be communicated is left out of the explicit text. The interpreter must reconstruct much of the intended meaning ; and the generator can leave out information that will be reconstructed. In this paper, we use an abductive approach to generation and interpretation to provide an account of how the generative and interpretive processes can be ...

Introduction In recent decades, large-scale English language proficiency testing and testing research have seen an increased interest in constructed-response essay-writing items (Aschbacher, 1991; Powers, Burstein, Chodorow, Fowles, & Kukich, 2001; Weigle, 2002). The TOEFL iBT, for example, includes two constructed-response writing tasks, one of which is an integrative task requiring the test-t...

Achieving communicative competency in English classes has been a key goal in contexts where English is taught as a foreign language (EFL). During this process, however, integrating the difficulty and complexity of real life tasks into classroom teaching has often been disregarded. Lack of opportunities for authentic language use often results in learners’ gaining extensive knowledge about the t...

Young people’s interaction online is rapidly increasing, which enables new spaces for communication; the impact on learning, however, is not yet acknowledged in education. The aim of this exploratory case study is to scrutinize how students frame their interaction in social networking sites (SNS) in school practices and what that implies for educational language teaching and learning practices....

Within information science, work on information credibility often focuses on generalized models of user assessment behavior and associated properties that mark credible information across document types, user groups, and communicative purposes. As conceptualized within the field of rhetoric, however, ethos, or a form of persuasive appeal that centers around a speaker’s believability, is situati...

BACKGROUND Beyond providing cues about an agent's intention, communicative actions convey information about the presence of a second agent towards whom the action is directed (second-agent information). In two psychophysical studies we investigated whether the perceptual system makes use of this information to infer the presence of a second agent when dealing with impoverished and/or noisy sens...

The teaching of Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) in the second half of the twentieth centuryhas been greatly influenced both by the communicative approach and by developments inresearch in discourse analysis, particularly with reference to genre. The integration of researchin corpus linguistics in the language-learning environment has been a more recent phenomenon,with publ...

This paper is focused on the evaluation of listening test that was realized with a view to objectively annotate expressive speech recordings and further develop a limited domain expressive speech synthesis system. There are two main issues to face in this task. The first matter in issue to be taken into consideration is the fact that expressivity in speech has to be defined in some way. The sec...

This paper introduces the theory of communicative competence by Hymes, the interpretation of communicative competence by Canale & Swain, the elements of efficient communication by Widdowson respectively, and the limitation of the previous application in China with the teaching environment of Classroom plus blackboard, analyzes the necessity and feasibility of creating authentic communicative en...