In patients with RA, FMD was impaired and IMT was increased, indicating early endothelial dysfunction and accelerated atherosclerosis. Early treatment of disease may reduce the risk of atherosclerosis in RA.

Entering the world of academic writing can be a troublesome experience for young researchers, especially for those writing in ESL. In addition to mastering the specific language of their disciplinary community, they also have to adopt an array of metadiscourse features which help them organize their writing and position themselves towards their content and their readers. Research on the use of metadiscourse in academic writing has indicated that ESL writers generally do not use metadiscourse elements to the same extent and in the same way as native English speakers. The paper will focus on the process of developing the awareness of metadiscourse features with young researchers and will attempt to gain an insight into how they adopt and apply these linguistic elements in their writing. It is based on a case study with three young researchers from the Faculty of Technical Sciences in Novi Sad, Serbia, whose research articles will be analyzed in relation to the correct usage of metadiscourse as well as its potential absence, using Hyland's framework. In the subsequent analysis, a questionnaire and interviews will be used to determine the degree of young authors' awareness of their use of metadiscourse and their approach to applying it in their writing. The triangulation between the corpus analysis and the questionnaire and interview data will try to address the issues of the reasons for using specific markers, the importance they attach to the use of metadiscourse in relation to the content of the research articles, and the methods of learning them, in order to unfold the correlation of beginnings of academic writing and the use of metadiscourse. It is hoped that the results of the analysis can be applied in teaching academic writing.

The demand for changing the conceptions of teaching and learning has brought peer-and self-assessment into the classroom. This paper presents the challenges teachers have to face while preparing the assessment process for the ESP classroom, with a special emphasis on developing ESP students' speaking skills. It is of primary importance that teachers know how to prepare the assessment criteria, how to instruct students on this topic and provide them with adequate feedback while avoiding possible barriers and misunderstandings along the process. The paper further demonstrates how students become active participants in the learning process and are asked to contribute in providing assessment criteria and feedback. While learning speaking skills, students also learn how to assess themselves and others. That enables them to raise awareness of the most common problems and mistakes they encounter when developing their communication skills and increases the overall level of their language ability and performance. As a result, teachers might dedicate more time to other useful classroom activities.

New forms of discourse which have emerged as a result of synergies between traditional and digital genres utilize the resources of multimodal and hypertextual communication to change the ways in which knowledge is communicated. This case study examines the online edition of the IEEE Spectrum magazine, which uses the potential of new media and integrates a variety of genres to inform the members of IEEE, the world’s largest engineering association, about advancements in technology, engineering, and science. The study seeks to explore in what ways the newly evolved genre of the hypermodal digital article is related to the genres traditionally used for the dissemination of scientific knowledge and how the affordances of digital format maximize knowledge dissemination.

Theoretical basis of this paper is the heuristic L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS). The research aims to determine the degree to which the ideal L2 self can be regarded as a significant factor with regards to its power to make a difference in students’ actual motivated behaviour in L2 communication. The research sample consists of 396 students. The ideal L2 self is a predictor variable. Willingness to communicate and the obtained grades are criterion variables. Gender, period of time spent learning English / German, and whether students are residing in the country where the target language is spoken are all moderator variables. Systematic non-experimental observation method based on Dörnyei and Taguchi´s survey was used in this study. Cronbach’s alpha indicated high reliability in the presented sample (.92). Willingness to communicate was investigated using McCroskey´s questionnaire. The findings indicate a rather complex picture of the observed L2 MSS constructs and the importance of their components in the field of L2 learning. Therefore, for further research, it is suggested that the ideal L2 self should be divided into two constructs: obligations that the individual would like to comply with and obligations that others expect him/her to comply with. The contribution of the L2 learning experience should also be considered because otherwise, it is difficult to determine the progress of the model design and what to do with it in practice.