Azizullah Mirzaei; Mahmood Hashemian; Fatemeh Safari
Volume 4, Issue 2 , Summer and Autumn 2016, , Pages 39-54
Abstract
Before a president practically begins his four-year term of office in Iran, a formal inaugural ceremony is held in the parliament. Being attended by national dignitaries and representatives from other countries, the inauguration of Iran's seventh president, Hasan Rouhani, was spectacular in several respects. ...
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Before a president practically begins his four-year term of office in Iran, a formal inaugural ceremony is held in the parliament. Being attended by national dignitaries and representatives from other countries, the inauguration of Iran's seventh president, Hasan Rouhani, was spectacular in several respects. The current study aimed at investigating the generic structure and rhetorical moves that ran through the president’s inaugural discourse. Then, a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach, drawing upon Fairclough’s three dimensional approach (2010), was adopted to explore the socio-cultural, religious, and political values underlying different rhetorical moves he employed in his inaugural address. The results demonstrated that Rouhani constructed his inaugural address on a succession of 9 generic moves using an interdiscursive mix of generic (i.e., inaugural, report, informational) and discoursal (i.e., religious, constitutional, and revolutionary) structures to reach out to different sectors of Iranian population. The predominant inaugural genre was then manifested largely through intertextuality and interdiscursivity, drawing upon other related (sub-) genres.
Azizullah Mirzaee; Maryam Esmaeili
Volume 1, Issue 1 , Winter and Spring 2013, , Pages 89-100
Abstract
L2 research has shown that instruction in L2 pragmatics is necessary. The current study evaluated the impact of explicit instruction on EFL learner's awareness and production of three speech acts of request, apology, and complaint. It also probed whether learners’ language proficiency plays any ...
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L2 research has shown that instruction in L2 pragmatics is necessary. The current study evaluated the impact of explicit instruction on EFL learner's awareness and production of three speech acts of request, apology, and complaint. It also probed whether learners’ language proficiency plays any role in incorporating pragmatic instruction into the L2 classroom. Iranian undergraduate students majoring in English with low and high levels of proficiency participated in the study. The instruction lasted for about 12 weeks. Achievement in L2 pragmatics was assessed based on a pretest-posttest plan using Multiple-Choice Discourse Comprehension Test (MDCT) and Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT). The significant gains made by the experimental groups receiving instruction support the claim recently made by instructional pragmatics that explicit instruction does facilitate the development of pragmatically appropriate use of language. Yet, learners’ level of language proficiency had no significant role in the incorporation of the instruction. Further theoretical issues are also discussed.