The current study investigated the effectiveness of genre-based instruction on the development of EFL learners’ writing skills. Participants were 34 undergraduate students majoring in textile engineering at an Iranian state university, and they had enrolled in the English for specific academic purposes course. Participants were taught how to write 4 types of business letters, highlighting the p...

This paper analyzes the relation between usability and aesthetics. In a laboratory study, 80 participants used one of four different versions of the same online shop, differing in interface-aesthetics (low vs. high) and interface-usability (low vs. high). Participants had to find specific items and rate the shop before and after usage on perceived aesthetics and perceived usability, which were ...

This is the age of Aesthetics, Beauty, and Design. Newly available product innovations from the Apple i-phone to the latest Dyson vacuum reflect aesthetic values. Indeed, Apple's success has been attributed to the infusion of aesthetics into product design. This model of product creation has resulted in Apple becoming one of the largest and most profitable corporations in the United States. Acc...

Though aesthetics is generally acknowledged as an important aspect of website design, extant information systems (IS) research on web user experience has rarely studied what affects website aesthetics and how aesthetics influences users’ perceptions of the website and the organization behind the website. In this paper, we synthesize prior literature from different academic domains and propose u...

Despite its centrality to human thoughts and practices, aesthetics has largely been ignored in Web site design. Until recent years, studies begin to show that task-unrelated (aesthetic) qualities such as color, graphics and music can play an important role in enhancing both usage and enjoyment of information systems as well as improving work quality. However, research progress has been greatly ...

Literary genres are commonly viewed as being defined in terms of content and style. In this paper, we focus on one particular type of content feature, namely lexical expressions of emotion, and investigate the hypothesis that emotion-related information correlates with particular genres. Using genre classification as a testbed, we compare a model that computes lexiconbased emotion scores global...

the exportation of modern novel from european languages to other literatures has long been the object of study and has been, most recently, evoked in discussions of world literature. the introduction of modern novel into the persian literary system through translation occurred about the turn of the twentieth century. the genre was unprecedented in persian and the concept of adabiyat was specifi...

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...

Aesthetics is advocated as a key factor influencing consumer judgment and preference; however, research in IS and HCI has paid limited attention to it until recently. This study investigated the effects of website aesthetics, along with website usability, on users’ online purchase intention. Additionally, the moderator of task involvement was introduced to explain how aesthetics influences util...