The use of modern communicative language teaching approaches in the language classrooms and the wide-spread use of English Language have increased the demand to learn good communication skills but existence of such feelings in the learners may prevent them from achieving the desired goal. Consideration of learners’ anxiety reactions in learning to speak another language by a language teacher is...

increasingly intercultural dimension of communication in the 21st century has brought about challenging aims in efl (english as a foreign language) pedagogy, such as ascertaining the enhancement of the learners' intercultural awareness and promoting their ability to communicate in intercultural settings. taking the disadvantage of efl environment in terms of intercultural input into account, co...

In recent years, the importance of vagueness and uncertainty in the messages exchanged between agents has been highlighted mainly due to the ubiquitous nature of the (artificial or human) agents’ communication. The imprecision in the communication becomes more significant when the autonomy of the agents increases or the number of exchanged messages for a communicative goal is limited. In this p...

Language users are remarkably good at making inferences about speakers’ intentions in context, and children learning their native language also display substantial skill in acquiring the meanings of unknown words. These two cases are deeply related: Language users invent new terms in conversation, and language learners learn the literal meanings of words based on their pragmatic inferences abou...

High penetrability of wireless, mobile, portable, and handheld devices has resultedin education for all as the mobile’s challenge coincides with an unprecedentedgrowth in access to pedagogical materials technology, particularly in developingcountries (UNESCO Mobile Learning Week Report, 2011). The present study setout to discover how Muslim learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) areenc...

We conducted an Artificial Language Learning experiment to examine the production behavior of language learners in a dynamic communicative setting. Participants were exposed to a miniature language with two optional formal devices and were then asked to use the acquired language to transfer information in a cooperative game. The results showed that language learners optimize their use of the op...

Research on language in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) has been fueled by persistent theoretical controversies for two decades. These shifted from initial focus on dissociations between language and cognition functions, to examining the paradox of socio-communicative impairments despite high sociability and relatively proficient expressive language. We investigated possible sources of ...

from paper presented at BAAL IC SIG Annual Seminar:Language Teaching and Language Learning, University of Edinburgh, March 2014. The main aim of the talk is to explore the role of (critical) cultural awareness in teachertraining pedagogies. Based on the assumption that language teachers want to develop theirstudents’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC), it behoves the teach...

BACKGROUND Constructivist approaches to learning focus on learning environments in which students have the opportunity to construct knowledge themselves, and negotiate this knowledge with others. Discovery learning and collaborative learning are examples of learning contexts that cater for knowledge construction processes. We introduce a computer-based learning environment in which the two form...