In spite of its prevalence in Iranian Persian-speaking communities, the issue of self-sacrifice e... more In spite of its prevalence in Iranian Persian-speaking communities, the issue of self-sacrifice expressions as a culture-specific verbal behavior has remained almost ignored in the existing literature on speech acts. The current study is an enquiry into the use of self-sacrifice expressions by Iranian Persian speakers in performing different speech acts such as thanking, sympathizing, and expressing affection and love. Serving as a device of encoding emotion into speech, self-sacrifice expressions have been found to be of variety in diction as well as variation in frequency across such social factors as age, gender, and education level. The results indicate pragmalinguistic variations in the use of self-sacrifice expressions in terms of social context, gender, age, and educational level. The tenets of this study are intended to be of insight into socio-cultural aspects of self-sacrifice expressions in language use.
Drown on a rapport management approach, this study examines how Persian Native Speakers perform r... more Drown on a rapport management approach, this study examines how Persian Native Speakers perform requests in service-encounters through. The data were collected from among 100 PNS by means of a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) consisting of six scenarios with three Likert-scale emotional evaluation. The results suggested a significant effect of participants" perception of sociality rights and obligation, interactional goal, and face sensitivities on the requestive behaviour of PNS who favored direct strategies much more than indirect ones. In terms of the internal and external modifications, PNS generally utilized more external modifiers in situations with lower obligation and higher difficulty, while they employed internal modifiers in situations with higher sociality rights and obligations and lower difficulty to make their requests. Regarding alerters, they used apologetic formula in situations with higher difficulty and title +greeting in normal situations. The results also s...
This research discusses the variations of repair strategies used by lecturers and students during... more This research discusses the variations of repair strategies used by lecturers and students during the online learning process. The aim of the study is to compare repair strategy variations in online learning in the university classroom during the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia, Algeria and Iran. The research data are a series of utterances by lecturers and students in online classes, which were collected from video and audio recordings of three different university classroom sessions. The data collection was carried out using record and note techniques. The data were analyzed by applying the theories of Sacks et. al. (2015) & Learner (2004) to describe the variations of repair strategies in the EFL university classroom. The results show that four different variations of repair strategies were used by lecturers and students in EFL university classrooms in Indonesia, Algeria, and Iran: self-initiated self-repair, other-initiated self-repair, self-initiated other-repair, and other-init...
The present study aimed to inquire how Burundian students in Iran use multilingual competence in ... more The present study aimed to inquire how Burundian students in Iran use multilingual competence in their strategies of acquiring the vocabulary of Persian as an L3. Were investigated the frequency of cross-linguistic learner strategies, the distribution of lexical transfer types across strategy types, and the influence of prior linguistic knowledge on learner strategies. A background information questionnaire, a modified version of the Oxford’s (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), and a questionnaire were used to collect data from fourteen subjects. Findings from the quantitative and qualitative data analyses suggested that, while all strategies were used, the cross-linguistic strategies that were most frequently used by participants were metacognitive, memory, and social strategies. Findings also showed that form transfer was most used by the participants in social strategies, meaning transfer in metacognitive strategies while affective strategies most made use of form and meaning transfer. The findings finally revealed that all languages previously known to participants were influential with English (penultimate acquired language) exertingthe greatest role while Kirundi, the participants’ native language appeared to be the least influential.
Abstract—The present study investigated the nature of the speech act of congratulation in terms o... more Abstract—The present study investigated the nature of the speech act of congratulation in terms of the Taxonomy proposed by Elwood (2004), representing the basic verbal strategies used by Iranian Persian speakers in offering congratulations. Based on the modified version of Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness (1987), it further explored the positive politeness strategies in the congratulation speech act. Fifty informants filled in a discourse completion test, consisting of 9 situations related to happy news. The analysis of the data revealed that the mostly used types of congratulation strategies were “Illocutionary Force Indicating Devise (IFID)”, “Offer of good wishes ” and “Expression of happiness”. Regarding the positive politeness strategies the result was indicative of the fact that Iranian people mostly made use of the strategies “Giving gift to listener”, “Exaggeration ” and “In-group identity marker ” when responding to other’s happy news. Index Terms—sociopragmatics, ...
The present study investigates Iranian EFL learners' subjectivity in single-subject retrospec... more The present study investigates Iranian EFL learners' subjectivity in single-subject retrospective verbal reports that allow the examination of the changes in the cognitive, social and affective processes involved in L2 pragmatic production. To this end, eighteen EFL learners at three proficiency levels produced verbal reports after the administration of a written discourse completion task eliciting requests and apology in asymmetrical (status-unequal) relations in institutional discourse. Qualitative analyses of students' responses indicate that sociocultural, socio-psychological and socio-affective aspects of the discourse situations influenced both their pragmalinguistic and sociolinguistic choices and negotiation of lexical and grammatical choices in planning the speech acts of requests and apologies. Apparently, the degree of sociocultural accommodation to the L2 pragmatic norms may be a matter of choice as of ability.
Reverse addressing is an interesting realization of kinship terms in interactive, face to face co... more Reverse addressing is an interesting realization of kinship terms in interactive, face to face communication. This descriptive study was proposed to examine the use of family address pronouns in Iran as a function of the classical sociological parameters of age, sex, and social distance. It investigated various aspects of reverse addressing as a vernacular phenomenon. Data were reported from the spontaneous productions of 7 Persian natives of varying ages and genders, using record examination. Representative examples were extracted from the corpus to provide a thick description of this underexplored phenomenon. The occurrence of the same phenomenon in vernacular variety of other languages is also reported throughout the study just to point out that, though not universal, this is not a unique feature of modern Persian. However, this is not a substantial report since it is such a broad topic that cannot be fully discussed within the scope of this study.
Abstract—The present study investigated the nature of the speech act of congratulation in terms o... more Abstract—The present study investigated the nature of the speech act of congratulation in terms of the Taxonomy proposed by Elwood (2004), representing the basic verbal strategies used by Iranian Persian speakers in offering congratulations. Based on the modified version of Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness (1987), it further explored the positive politeness strategies in the congratulation speech act. Fifty informants filled in a discourse completion test, consisting of 9 situations related to happy news. The analysis of the data revealed that the mostly used types of congratulation strategies were “Illocutionary Force Indicating Devise (IFID)”, “Offer of good wishes ” and “Expression of happiness”. Regarding the positive politeness strategies the result was indicative of the fact that Iranian people mostly made use of the strategies “Giving gift to listener”, “Exaggeration ” and “In-group identity marker ” when responding to other’s happy news. Index Terms—sociopragmatics, ...
Working memory is believed to interact with second language (L2) learning at the cognitive level.... more Working memory is believed to interact with second language (L2) learning at the cognitive level. The present study sought to explore the impact of L2 readers' prior knowledge on the contribution of working memory to reading comprehension. Eighty Iranian English learners were divided into two groups of high and low by their scores on L2 knowledge and the topic knowledge tests. Their working memory spans, and reading comprehension abilities were measured via a working memory test and a reading comprehension test respectively. The results indicated that working memory significantly predicted L2 reading comprehension only when the readers had sufficient topic knowledge. The results also show that the learners’ comprehension was mostly determined by their L2 linguistic knowledge, even when they had considerable working memory capacity. The findings imply that readers' prior knowledge could moderate the contribution of working memory in L2 reading comprehension. A certain level o...
Most popular models of narratives and narrative analyses have been drawn on native stories, yet E... more Most popular models of narratives and narrative analyses have been drawn on native stories, yet EFL learners’ narratives have not received due narrative analysis. The present study then aims at scrutinizing the structure of personal English stories as told by EFL learners. To this aim, three hundred narratives were collected through classroom discussions and interviews. Qualitative analysis methods were utilized to find how narratives were recounted. The results of data analyses indicated that EFL learners’ narratives consisted of 4 parts with the abstract and coda sections absent from them. Besides, there were other differences between the collected narratives and those told by English native speakers.
International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Research, 2018
The use of politeness strategies can help interlocutors promote and/or maintain social harmony in... more The use of politeness strategies can help interlocutors promote and/or maintain social harmony in telephone interactions. Using the Rapport Management Model proposed by Spencer-Oatey (2008), this study aimed primarily to reinvestigate the closing structures of telephone conversation (hereafter abbreviated as TC) in Persian and to discover the common politeness strategies used by native Persian speakers to end their TCs considering the contextual variables of social distance and status. Moreover, this study tried to explore the effect of time availability/limitation along with those contextual variables on TC closing part. To this end, 30 Persian native speakers were selected randomly. A DCT (Discourse Completion Test) of 12 scenarios was developed by considering three criteria: status, time limitation and distance. Analyzing DCTs, many different TC closing patterns were found. The obtained findings depicted that the aforementioned variables had significant effects on the TC closing ...
This paper discusses the function of Persian in comparison with Armenian, the language used in on... more This paper discusses the function of Persian in comparison with Armenian, the language used in one area of Tehran. It is based on a random selection of 50 subjects from different sex, age, and occupational groups of Armenian with different levels of education in different domains, i.e. family, friendship, neighborhood, education, government and employment. In this study, the subjects were asked to decide what language they use in different domains on a 4-point scale. After collecting the data by the use of a questionnaire with 30 situations in the seven domains and analyzing them, I concluded that there is a Persian-Armenian diglossia in Armenian community. As a matter of fact, Armenian has been restricted to family domain and the young generation has lost it at a large extent.
The present study examined the different levels of (im)politeness strategies in expressing reques... more The present study examined the different levels of (im)politeness strategies in expressing request, apology, and refusal speech acts across intermediate and advanced Iranian EFL learners to identify their attitudinal ratings of their produced structures in terms of pragmatic success and (im)politeness mannerism. A discourse completion test including 2 Likert scales on attitudinal appropriateness and an(im)politeness mannerism test for every item was distributed among 110 participants (10 native and 100 nonnative English speakers), engaging them in addressing the speech acts to interlocutors of lower, equal, and higher social statuses with intimate or strange distance. Results indicated that despite having a high command of English, the learners showed deficiencies in the use of (im)politenessstrategies that may call for the inclusion of such strategies in EFL instruction programs.
For many English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers, working contingently with language learner... more For many English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers, working contingently with language learners' problematic learner contributions in classroom interaction remains a challenge. Drawing on conversation analysis methodology and using sociocultural and situated learning theories, this longitudinal case study traces the progressional changes in one Iranian English language teacher's repairing practices (his orientation to repairable, repair completion type and trajectory) along with the changing impacts of different organizational patterns of repair and interactional awareness on learning opportunities. The data material consists of video recordings of EFL oral classroom interactions (11 lessons) and reflective conversations (seven sessions) between the researcher and the participant teacher at one private language institute in Iran over a period of six months, in two phases. Qualitative results from the first (descriptive) phase indicated that the teacher's provision of ...
Wedding invitations (WIs), as a uniquely socially and culturally constructed genre, provide a dis... more Wedding invitations (WIs), as a uniquely socially and culturally constructed genre, provide a distinct opportunity to compare the sociocultural values of different speech communities as reflected in the textual content and organization of the different moves. Students can be exposed to this genre and its different moves using a genre-based pedagogy. Genre-based pedagogy can be used to provide the learners with an opportunity to study well-known genres in their first (L1) and second language (L2) and to be able to observe the common and distinctive moves from a cross-cultural, cross-linguistic perspective. This study was carried out to investigate the wedding invitations in American and Iranian societies through two complementary approaches: genre analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA). One hundred wedding invitation (WI) cards (50 from each society) were collected and analyzed comparatively. The ...
In spite of its prevalence in Iranian Persian-speaking communities, the issue of self-sacrifice e... more In spite of its prevalence in Iranian Persian-speaking communities, the issue of self-sacrifice expressions as a culture-specific verbal behavior has remained almost ignored in the existing literature on speech acts. The current study is an enquiry into the use of self-sacrifice expressions by Iranian Persian speakers in performing different speech acts such as thanking, sympathizing, and expressing affection and love. Serving as a device of encoding emotion into speech, self-sacrifice expressions have been found to be of variety in diction as well as variation in frequency across such social factors as age, gender, and education level. The results indicate pragmalinguistic variations in the use of self-sacrifice expressions in terms of social context, gender, age, and educational level. The tenets of this study are intended to be of insight into socio-cultural aspects of self-sacrifice expressions in language use.
Drown on a rapport management approach, this study examines how Persian Native Speakers perform r... more Drown on a rapport management approach, this study examines how Persian Native Speakers perform requests in service-encounters through. The data were collected from among 100 PNS by means of a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) consisting of six scenarios with three Likert-scale emotional evaluation. The results suggested a significant effect of participants" perception of sociality rights and obligation, interactional goal, and face sensitivities on the requestive behaviour of PNS who favored direct strategies much more than indirect ones. In terms of the internal and external modifications, PNS generally utilized more external modifiers in situations with lower obligation and higher difficulty, while they employed internal modifiers in situations with higher sociality rights and obligations and lower difficulty to make their requests. Regarding alerters, they used apologetic formula in situations with higher difficulty and title +greeting in normal situations. The results also s...
This research discusses the variations of repair strategies used by lecturers and students during... more This research discusses the variations of repair strategies used by lecturers and students during the online learning process. The aim of the study is to compare repair strategy variations in online learning in the university classroom during the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia, Algeria and Iran. The research data are a series of utterances by lecturers and students in online classes, which were collected from video and audio recordings of three different university classroom sessions. The data collection was carried out using record and note techniques. The data were analyzed by applying the theories of Sacks et. al. (2015) & Learner (2004) to describe the variations of repair strategies in the EFL university classroom. The results show that four different variations of repair strategies were used by lecturers and students in EFL university classrooms in Indonesia, Algeria, and Iran: self-initiated self-repair, other-initiated self-repair, self-initiated other-repair, and other-init...
The present study aimed to inquire how Burundian students in Iran use multilingual competence in ... more The present study aimed to inquire how Burundian students in Iran use multilingual competence in their strategies of acquiring the vocabulary of Persian as an L3. Were investigated the frequency of cross-linguistic learner strategies, the distribution of lexical transfer types across strategy types, and the influence of prior linguistic knowledge on learner strategies. A background information questionnaire, a modified version of the Oxford’s (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), and a questionnaire were used to collect data from fourteen subjects. Findings from the quantitative and qualitative data analyses suggested that, while all strategies were used, the cross-linguistic strategies that were most frequently used by participants were metacognitive, memory, and social strategies. Findings also showed that form transfer was most used by the participants in social strategies, meaning transfer in metacognitive strategies while affective strategies most made use of form and meaning transfer. The findings finally revealed that all languages previously known to participants were influential with English (penultimate acquired language) exertingthe greatest role while Kirundi, the participants’ native language appeared to be the least influential.
Abstract—The present study investigated the nature of the speech act of congratulation in terms o... more Abstract—The present study investigated the nature of the speech act of congratulation in terms of the Taxonomy proposed by Elwood (2004), representing the basic verbal strategies used by Iranian Persian speakers in offering congratulations. Based on the modified version of Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness (1987), it further explored the positive politeness strategies in the congratulation speech act. Fifty informants filled in a discourse completion test, consisting of 9 situations related to happy news. The analysis of the data revealed that the mostly used types of congratulation strategies were “Illocutionary Force Indicating Devise (IFID)”, “Offer of good wishes ” and “Expression of happiness”. Regarding the positive politeness strategies the result was indicative of the fact that Iranian people mostly made use of the strategies “Giving gift to listener”, “Exaggeration ” and “In-group identity marker ” when responding to other’s happy news. Index Terms—sociopragmatics, ...
The present study investigates Iranian EFL learners' subjectivity in single-subject retrospec... more The present study investigates Iranian EFL learners' subjectivity in single-subject retrospective verbal reports that allow the examination of the changes in the cognitive, social and affective processes involved in L2 pragmatic production. To this end, eighteen EFL learners at three proficiency levels produced verbal reports after the administration of a written discourse completion task eliciting requests and apology in asymmetrical (status-unequal) relations in institutional discourse. Qualitative analyses of students' responses indicate that sociocultural, socio-psychological and socio-affective aspects of the discourse situations influenced both their pragmalinguistic and sociolinguistic choices and negotiation of lexical and grammatical choices in planning the speech acts of requests and apologies. Apparently, the degree of sociocultural accommodation to the L2 pragmatic norms may be a matter of choice as of ability.
Reverse addressing is an interesting realization of kinship terms in interactive, face to face co... more Reverse addressing is an interesting realization of kinship terms in interactive, face to face communication. This descriptive study was proposed to examine the use of family address pronouns in Iran as a function of the classical sociological parameters of age, sex, and social distance. It investigated various aspects of reverse addressing as a vernacular phenomenon. Data were reported from the spontaneous productions of 7 Persian natives of varying ages and genders, using record examination. Representative examples were extracted from the corpus to provide a thick description of this underexplored phenomenon. The occurrence of the same phenomenon in vernacular variety of other languages is also reported throughout the study just to point out that, though not universal, this is not a unique feature of modern Persian. However, this is not a substantial report since it is such a broad topic that cannot be fully discussed within the scope of this study.
Abstract—The present study investigated the nature of the speech act of congratulation in terms o... more Abstract—The present study investigated the nature of the speech act of congratulation in terms of the Taxonomy proposed by Elwood (2004), representing the basic verbal strategies used by Iranian Persian speakers in offering congratulations. Based on the modified version of Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness (1987), it further explored the positive politeness strategies in the congratulation speech act. Fifty informants filled in a discourse completion test, consisting of 9 situations related to happy news. The analysis of the data revealed that the mostly used types of congratulation strategies were “Illocutionary Force Indicating Devise (IFID)”, “Offer of good wishes ” and “Expression of happiness”. Regarding the positive politeness strategies the result was indicative of the fact that Iranian people mostly made use of the strategies “Giving gift to listener”, “Exaggeration ” and “In-group identity marker ” when responding to other’s happy news. Index Terms—sociopragmatics, ...
Working memory is believed to interact with second language (L2) learning at the cognitive level.... more Working memory is believed to interact with second language (L2) learning at the cognitive level. The present study sought to explore the impact of L2 readers' prior knowledge on the contribution of working memory to reading comprehension. Eighty Iranian English learners were divided into two groups of high and low by their scores on L2 knowledge and the topic knowledge tests. Their working memory spans, and reading comprehension abilities were measured via a working memory test and a reading comprehension test respectively. The results indicated that working memory significantly predicted L2 reading comprehension only when the readers had sufficient topic knowledge. The results also show that the learners’ comprehension was mostly determined by their L2 linguistic knowledge, even when they had considerable working memory capacity. The findings imply that readers' prior knowledge could moderate the contribution of working memory in L2 reading comprehension. A certain level o...
Most popular models of narratives and narrative analyses have been drawn on native stories, yet E... more Most popular models of narratives and narrative analyses have been drawn on native stories, yet EFL learners’ narratives have not received due narrative analysis. The present study then aims at scrutinizing the structure of personal English stories as told by EFL learners. To this aim, three hundred narratives were collected through classroom discussions and interviews. Qualitative analysis methods were utilized to find how narratives were recounted. The results of data analyses indicated that EFL learners’ narratives consisted of 4 parts with the abstract and coda sections absent from them. Besides, there were other differences between the collected narratives and those told by English native speakers.
International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Research, 2018
The use of politeness strategies can help interlocutors promote and/or maintain social harmony in... more The use of politeness strategies can help interlocutors promote and/or maintain social harmony in telephone interactions. Using the Rapport Management Model proposed by Spencer-Oatey (2008), this study aimed primarily to reinvestigate the closing structures of telephone conversation (hereafter abbreviated as TC) in Persian and to discover the common politeness strategies used by native Persian speakers to end their TCs considering the contextual variables of social distance and status. Moreover, this study tried to explore the effect of time availability/limitation along with those contextual variables on TC closing part. To this end, 30 Persian native speakers were selected randomly. A DCT (Discourse Completion Test) of 12 scenarios was developed by considering three criteria: status, time limitation and distance. Analyzing DCTs, many different TC closing patterns were found. The obtained findings depicted that the aforementioned variables had significant effects on the TC closing ...
This paper discusses the function of Persian in comparison with Armenian, the language used in on... more This paper discusses the function of Persian in comparison with Armenian, the language used in one area of Tehran. It is based on a random selection of 50 subjects from different sex, age, and occupational groups of Armenian with different levels of education in different domains, i.e. family, friendship, neighborhood, education, government and employment. In this study, the subjects were asked to decide what language they use in different domains on a 4-point scale. After collecting the data by the use of a questionnaire with 30 situations in the seven domains and analyzing them, I concluded that there is a Persian-Armenian diglossia in Armenian community. As a matter of fact, Armenian has been restricted to family domain and the young generation has lost it at a large extent.
The present study examined the different levels of (im)politeness strategies in expressing reques... more The present study examined the different levels of (im)politeness strategies in expressing request, apology, and refusal speech acts across intermediate and advanced Iranian EFL learners to identify their attitudinal ratings of their produced structures in terms of pragmatic success and (im)politeness mannerism. A discourse completion test including 2 Likert scales on attitudinal appropriateness and an(im)politeness mannerism test for every item was distributed among 110 participants (10 native and 100 nonnative English speakers), engaging them in addressing the speech acts to interlocutors of lower, equal, and higher social statuses with intimate or strange distance. Results indicated that despite having a high command of English, the learners showed deficiencies in the use of (im)politenessstrategies that may call for the inclusion of such strategies in EFL instruction programs.
For many English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers, working contingently with language learner... more For many English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers, working contingently with language learners' problematic learner contributions in classroom interaction remains a challenge. Drawing on conversation analysis methodology and using sociocultural and situated learning theories, this longitudinal case study traces the progressional changes in one Iranian English language teacher's repairing practices (his orientation to repairable, repair completion type and trajectory) along with the changing impacts of different organizational patterns of repair and interactional awareness on learning opportunities. The data material consists of video recordings of EFL oral classroom interactions (11 lessons) and reflective conversations (seven sessions) between the researcher and the participant teacher at one private language institute in Iran over a period of six months, in two phases. Qualitative results from the first (descriptive) phase indicated that the teacher's provision of ...
Wedding invitations (WIs), as a uniquely socially and culturally constructed genre, provide a dis... more Wedding invitations (WIs), as a uniquely socially and culturally constructed genre, provide a distinct opportunity to compare the sociocultural values of different speech communities as reflected in the textual content and organization of the different moves. Students can be exposed to this genre and its different moves using a genre-based pedagogy. Genre-based pedagogy can be used to provide the learners with an opportunity to study well-known genres in their first (L1) and second language (L2) and to be able to observe the common and distinctive moves from a cross-cultural, cross-linguistic perspective. This study was carried out to investigate the wedding invitations in American and Iranian societies through two complementary approaches: genre analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA). One hundred wedding invitation (WI) cards (50 from each society) were collected and analyzed comparatively. The ...
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