A key prerequisite to make user instruction of work tasks by interactive demonstration effective and convenient is situated multi-modal interaction aiming at an enhancement of robot learning beyond simple low-level skill acquisition. We report the status of the Bielefeld GRAVIS-robot system that combines visual attention and gestural instruction with an intelligent interface for speech recognit...

the present study aims to investigate the relative effectiveness of different types of pragmatic instruction including two collaborative translation tasks and two structured input tasks with and without explicit pragmatic instruction on the production of apologetic utterances by low-intermediate efl learners. one hundred and fifty university students in four experimental groups and one control ...

This study investigated the effectiveness of explicit pragmatic instruction on the acquisition of requests by college-level English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners in Taiwan. The goal was to determine first whether the use of explicit pragmatic instruction had a positive effect on EFL learners’ pragmatic competence. Second, the relative effectiveness of presenting pragmatics through two deli...

Research on the effect of implicit and explicit instruction on developing learners’ explicit knowledge by the use of measures of explicit knowledge abounds in the literature. However, measuring learners’ implicit knowledge employing fine-grained measures has rarely been the concern of researchers in the field. Therefore, the present study is an attempt to scrutinize the effectiveness of implici...

Though very often quantitative problem solving is accentuated in physics instruction, psychological as well as educational research indicates that this emphasis is misleading. In an experimental study, we compared physics instruction with a focus on quantitative problem solving to physics instruction with a focus on qualitative problem solving. Initially, students were taught quantitative as we...

Argument maps as schematic representations of arguments and their logical and evidential relationships are effective diagrams for instruction in education as well as in L2 development. However, their use for teaching L2 writing in EFL contexts has not been adequately studied. Therefore, this study investigated the effect of argument mapping instruction on Iranian EFL learners’ writing achieveme...

Task-based language Teaching (TBLT) has occupied the pertinent literature for some long years. However, the role of specific task type in developing specific skill type seems to be amongst the intact issues in the literature. To shed more light on this issue, the present study was conducted to compare the effect of jigsaw and decision-making tasks on improving listening and speaking abilities o...

We present an agent, called RosieTAG, which is implemented in Soar and interacts with an external robotic environment. Rosie learns new games through interactive instruction with a human via restricted natural language. Instead of learning policy or strategy information as is common in other game learners, Rosie learns multiple game formulations (the objects, players, and rules of a game) and t...

When 2 tasks must be performed concurrently, each requiring a choice of response, dual-task slowing is typically found. However, E. H. Schumacher et al. (1997) reported that dual-task slowing can be eliminated when equal priority is assigned to each task. Experiment 1 largely confirmed this with the same tasks as Schumacher et al. (tasks using stimulus-response combinations of visual-manual and...