Background: Loss of consciousness and respiratory failure are the most important medical problems in acute benzodiazepines (BZDs) toxicity. The possibility of respiratory apnea increases in intentional cases and also in the presence of underlying cardiopulmonary diseases. The inhibitory effect of aminophylline on adenosine receptor may be the cause of recovery of consciousness in patients intoxicated by BZDs. The effect of aminophylline as an agonist of cAMP (cyclic adenosine monophosphate), on reversal of inhibitory effects of BZDs (benzodiazepines) on the brain and increasing the level of consciousness is the main question. Method: we reviewed literature sources on topic of aminophylline and consciousness. 29 articles were compiled from prestigious scientific databases such as PubMed, Scopus and Elsevier, from 1983 to 2017. Results: This review showed that intravenous aminophylline can lead to clinical improvement of both consciousness and respiration via antagonizing sedation that induced by BZDs. Although administration of flumazenil is still the first choice for apnea related to BZDs overdose and it is also more potent than aminophylline on reversing sedation, aminophylline can be substituted when flumazenil is not available or when it has contraindication such as in epileptic patients and in overdoses with drugs capable of causing convulsion. Also, aminophylline is useful in those BZD-intoxicated patients with coincident underlying COPD and asthma. Conclusion: intravenous aminophylline could decrease the sedative effects of BZDs and also speed up the recovery of consciousness in patients under sedative effects of BZDs.

The present study evaluated five current international ELT series regarding inclusion of grammar and vocabulary consciousness raising activities. Drawing upon Willis and Willis (1996) and Graves and Taffe (2007), a Likert-scale questionnaire was developed and validated which was completed by 90 Iranian EFL teachers and 170 Iranian EFL students, forty of whom (20 teachers and 20 students) also sat an interview. The results of inferential statistics (i.e. Independent Samples t-test and Chi-square analysis) revealed there was no significant difference between the responses of the teachers and students in this respect. That is, the results of the questionnaire combined with content analysis of the interviews and subjective evaluation of the researchers indicated although the ELT series incorporated different kinds of grammar and vocabulary activities, they did not include some of the major grammar and vocabulary consciousness raising activities (e.g., making generalizations, cross-referencing, reconstructing, discussing word choices, researching about vocabularies, etc.).

The objective of the present study was to show the need for grammar instruction in the English language classroom and how this need could be fulfilled through an effective pedagogy combining a bottom-up explicit teacher centered grammatical instruction with a top-down communicative approach. To this end, from among 100 female intermediate-level students at a junior high school in Babol, Iran, 60 homogeneous students were assigned to the control and experimental groups following the administration of a standardized English proficiency test. Then, a multiple-choice pretest of grammar was administered, the results of which indicated that the two groups were homogeneous in terms of their knowledge of grammar. During the instruction, the experimental group was instructed using grammatical consciousness-raising (C-R) activities to reinforce the grammar points and the control group practiced grammar through the use of communicative techniques. Afterwards, both groups took part in a grammar posttest identical to the one used as the pretest. Using a t-test, the researchers found that the treatment had a significant effect on the grammar knowledge of the experimental group. It was concluded that the use of C-R activities could be a very efficient technique in improving the grammatical knowledge of EFL learners.

The present study attempted to investigate the impact of sentence-level grammar instruction, explicitly and through consciousness-raising, on Iranian EFL learners’ lexical inferencing behavior and subsequent learning of inferred vocabulary. It also aimed at examining the relationship between the number of used knowledge sources and success in lexical inferencing. To address these issues, a quasi-experimental study with a mixed design involving two treatment groups and one control group was conducted. The participants were 47 adult learners at intermediate proficiency level. A counterbalanced design was utilized to eliminate the effect of the topic familiarity on the learners’ performance. Retrospective data were collected from eight participants, as well. Further, the eight participants were divided into two groups (successful and less successful) in order to identify the differences between the two groups’ lexical inferencing behavior. The findings indicated that sentence-level grammar instruction could place learners in a better position to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words more successfully and also could help them recall the inferred vocabulary better. The results are significant due to the controversy surrounding teaching grammar; moreover, they confirm the positive role of the number of knowledge sources in the lexical inferencing success.

The present study was an attempt to investigate the effects of consciousness– raising tasks and input enrichment tasks on learners’ grammar acquisition. To this purpose, two intact groups (number of each was 17) were chosen. One group was considered as the experimental group and the second group was considered as the control group of the study. Some grammatical features were taught through consciousness– raising tasks to the experimental group and the control group was taught the grammatical structures through input enrichment tasks. The results of statistical procedures and Independent pair T-test showed no significant difference between the means of the groups. The findings support the arguments regarding the importance of both tactics in grammar learning but they had different impacts on learners. Consciousness-raising involves an attempt to equip the learners with declarative or explicit knowledge. Input enrichment task equipped learners with procedural or implicit knowledge. The researchers suggested other researchers and teachers applying these approaches in order to promote learners’ grammar and to achieve further findings.