Background: Impairments in social communication are ubiquitous after moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). Most attempts to quantify these impairments have been descriptive rather than theoretically motivated. We propose that Relevance Theory provides a framework for characterizing social communication limitations after TBI and linking…

In the twenty-first-century working professionals need to possess strong Interactional Competence to handle professional communication in intercultural contexts (PCIC). However, the relationship among the three PCIC constituents -- culture, workplace and interaction -- is undertheorized in current research. This leaves PCIC practitioners…

Drawing on Conversation Analysis, this paper investigates how an English native speaker interviewer utilizes clarification requests as a form of recipient design during an interview to resolve problems of non-understanding. This data is contrasted with interviews between English language learners at a private university in Taiwan. The findings…

The study of multimodality in communication has attracted the attention of researchers studying online multimodal environments such as virtual worlds. Specifically, 3D virtual worlds have especially attracted the interest of educators and academics due to the multiplicity of verbal channels, which are often comprised of text and voice channels, as…

Although there has been a steady rise of empirical studies investigating pragmatic strategies in oral communication using English as a lingua franca (ELF), there have been relatively few published studies about pragmatic strategies in written ELF communication. Email, despite its current popularity, has scarcely been examined in ELF communication.…

The article provides analysis of the interrupted communication as part of the communication in the election discourse. The authors explored the most typical reasons for the interrupted communication in the electoral discourse analyzed communication failures as a kind of ineffective communication. Communication failures are presented as a result of…

This article discusses ways in which misunderstandings arise in Tactile Australian Sign Language (Tactile Auslan) and how they are resolved. Of particular interest are the similarities to and differences from the same processes in visually signed and spoken conversation. This article draws on detailed conversation analysis (CA) and demonstrates…

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been argued to cause (mis)communication issues. Research and practice suggest a range of tactics and strategies for educators focused on how to encourage and foster communication in a virtual learning environment (VLE) (eg, Salmon). However, while frameworks such as Salmon's support the effective…

Many studies have explored the difficulties faced by foreign language learners when they begin the learning journey from survival to advanced level. Most of these investigations, however, tend to focus on what makes the road to fluency strewn with obstacles and challenges; no significant attention has been paid to what makes the journey…

An area of visual communication that might be classified as a "design failure" is the visual presentation of information about "prescription-only medicines" for patients. This information is provided on packaging, leaflets, brochures, labels and websites. The practical issue is that there are problems in convincing patients to…