We developed a method for using Coh-Metrix to automatically analyze tutorial dialogues. Coh-Metrix, a web-based tool for automatically evaluating text, is freely available to researchers. We applied the method to 190 tutorial dialogues between women and "BRCA Gist" from two experiments. "BRCA Gist" is an intelligent tutoring…

Instrumental texts, as an important part of the textbooks, play an important role in organizing the teaching content and the teaching activities, facilitating the communication of the teacher, students and textbooks. Therefore, it is of great theoretical and practical significance to study and evaluate the instrumental texts of the textbooks. The…

This longitudinal study examined whether and to what extent the production of voice onset time (VOT) for /p/, /t/, and /k/ in English was improved in second language (L2) learners by enrolment in a content-based instruction (CBI) program at a Japanese university. Measures of VOTs were elicited at the beginning, middle, and end of the academic year…

Linking adverbials are important for creating textual cohesion in both written and spoken English. While there are reference grammar books describing the usage patterns of linking adverbials and studies investigating learners' difficulties in using these cohesive devices, there is little discussion on how to effectively teach and learn them. By…

This research examines the acquisition of letter-position processing. Study 1 investigated letter-position processing in Grades 1-6 and adult readers, using the occurrence of specific error types as the outcome measure. Between Grades 1 and 2, there was a shift from making more other-word to making more letter-position errors. This shift was a…

This paper seeks to investigate whether the Japanese government's attempt to promote a 'gender-equal' society in recent decades and the improved status of women are reflected in patterns of gender representation in Japanese English as a foreign language textbooks. The study made an analysis of four popular series of English language textbooks…

This chapter describes how one particular Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), created at the University of Southampton, has evolved beyond its core purpose as a promotional tool, to complement and serve purposes and priorities of relevance and importance to wider university strategic aims. It briefly outlines elements of the course design and…

This study assesses the extent to which machine learning techniques can be used to predict question quality. An algorithm based on textual complexity indices was previously developed to assess question quality to provide feedback on questions generated by students within iSTART (an intelligent tutoring system that teaches reading strategies). In…

Neoliberal ideology has enjoyed tremendous success over the past thirty-five years by discursively suppressing structural dissent among working and middle class citizens of industrialized countries. The general decline in economic conditions faced by contemporary workers, coupled with the 2008 global financial crisis, forced neoliberal advocates…

Other-orientation (Linell, 2009) is an essential element of language in that all speakers dialogue with an "other" when communicating. They take into consideration the other's assumed perspective, knowledge, and needs, and manipulate their language in response to these assumptions. This study investigated the extent to which…

This study aims at describing the functions of passive voice and how authors reflect their stance through those functions in Turkish academic discourse. Depending on the findings of a corpus based research, this study makes a counterpoint to functionalist views on the ground that passivization does not necessarily result in promoting agents in…

In this paper, I discuss the themes of personification and de-personification in the Prophet Muhammad's Tradition from a cognitive linguistic viewpoint. Instances of personification and de- personification in Prophet Muhammad's Tradition are analysed following approaches of conceptual metaphor theory and critical metaphor analysis. The analysis…

The author performs a theoretical analysis of the educational experience in philology teachers' professional training in Germany in the context of solving scientific problem of literary competence development. Internal and external factors of this process have been determined both by socio-political realities, economic, philosophical, cultural,…

This research aims at discovering the gap between Standard Arabic and the current spoken varieties of Arabic due to social, educational, political, colonial, and media factors. The researcher will try to also analyse the causes of the current gap and suggest remedies. Standard Arabic (SA) or FuSha (the Arabic term for "standard Arabic")…

Parametric analyses such as t tests and ANOVAs are the norm--if not the default--statistical tests found in quantitative applied linguistics research (Gass 2009). Applied statisticians and one applied linguist (Larson-Hall 2010, 2012; Larson-Hall and Herrington 2010), however, have argued that this approach may not be appropriate for small samples…