By means of a discourse completion test (DCT) and a discourse elicitation test (DET) this study investigates the awareness and production of requests and request act modifiers of 104 nonnative speakers of English from 31 nationalities during different lengths of stay in the UK. The paper first of all provides a brief overview of studies that deal with pragmatic development and periods abroad and then, describes the data collection procedure and methodology employed. Results show that the early stages of a stay abroad are decisive in developing an awareness of pragmatic infelicities. With respect to production of requests, our results do not show statistically significant differences, suggesting that length of stay does not affect request act use. There is also evidence that learners in the study abroad context increase their pragmatic repertoire of internal and external modifiers at later stages of their stay in the UK.

Is passion important in the educational context? What are the benefits of passion? Is it possible to foster students' passion? What are the teachers' characteristics or behaviors that foster students' passion? The aim of this study was to answer this questions by a literature review, as well as to present a global and current picture about the role of passion in Education. Although research on passion is really recent and, therefore, still scarce, the literature reviewed showed a great variety of passion's outcomes, which highlights the importance it has in the educational context. We also tried to summarize the teachers' characteristics studied up to now that can foster the students' passion. We concluded by presenting the potential implications of the articles reviewed within education, and presenting the main conclusions of the review.

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