the purpose of the present study was to explore the effectiveness of raising iranian learners’ pragmatic awareness of intercultural rhetoric in enhancing their l2 writing ability, as well as their written complexity and accuracy. to this end, two 25-member groups of efl learners who were taking basic writing course at islamic azad university, roudehen branch, were selected based on their perfor...

the present study was planned to investigate the efficiency of explicit teaching and adequacy of the l2 learners' exposure to l2 input in academic contexts in iran. the case at hand was the acquisition of referential, quasi and expletive subject pronouns, as three different types of obligatory subjects in english. 96 iranian efl learners were selected from two universities in isfahan. they were...

We examined the brain activity underlying the development of our understanding of negative numbers, which are amounts lacking direct physical counterparts. Children performed a paired comparison task with positive and negative numbers during an fMRI session. As previously shown in adults, both pre-instruction fifth-graders and post-instruction seventh-graders demonstrated typical behavioral and...

In robotics, learning from demonstration is a research field that has gained a lot of attention since it provides an easy and intuitive way to teach a robot complex movements. When teaching a human it is common to use natural language to provide additional information. Regardless of that, it is rarely investigated how speech can be used in addition for teaching a robot with learning from demons...

Professional development is critical in providing constant updates on EFL teachers’ teaching practice. This mixed methods study was conducted to explore the effects of participation in action research on EFL teachers’ practice. Eighteen junior school English teachers participated in this study. Teacher participants conducted their action research during a five-month period. The quantitative pha...