دکتر مریم فرنیا

With the advancement of technology, students’ means of communication have changed from regular face-to-face appointments to email communications with professors and faculty members. Students send emails to faculty members for several reasons such as requests for appointments, advice, or course-related information. This study investigates email request strategies used by Iranian university students when communicating with their faculty members. To this end, a corpus of 200 emails (13103 words) was compiled within 4 years from Payame Noor University students majoring in humanities. The data were then coded for request strategies along with both internal and external modification devices. The findings showed that direct strategies were the most frequently used, with imperative and like/appreciate statements being the most frequently used direct strategy. Moreover, downtoners and attention getters ranked first and second among internal modification devices, while grounders and appreciation ranked first and second among external modifiers. These findings are expected to provide insights into Persian pragmatics and have implications for teaching Persian to language learners.

One of the methods of persuasion in academic linguistic interactions is the use of metadiscourse markers. These markers are a tool to facilitate communication, increase the readability of the text, establish a relationship with the readers and involve them, and avoid rejecting the author's interpretations. The purpose of this study is to explore meta-discourse markers in academic correspondence between students and professors. To this end, 200 student e-mails (13,103 words in size) were randomly selected between 2019 and 2022, and were analyzed based on Hyland's (2005) model of meta-discourse markers with two categories of interactive metadiscourse markers (including transitive markers, frame markers, endophoric markers, evidentials and code glosses) and interactional metadiscourse markers (including hedges, boosters, attitude markers, self-mentions and engagement markers). The relationship between the frequency of either of interactive or interactional markers with one of the Aristotle's rhetorical triangle (i.e., logos, ethos and pathos) (Hyland, 2005) is also discussed. Results show that the use of interactional metadiscourse markers was more than interactive metadiscourse markers in the corpus. Also, the engagement marker as an indicator of appealing to pathos was the most frequently used interactional markers in the corpus. In addition, transitive markers, as an indicator of appealing to logos, has the highest frequency among interactive metadiscourse markers. The results of this study conform to the previous findings that the use of metadiscourse markers depend on the context and genre in which it is used.

The study investigated the role of age of arrival, length of resistance, amount and types of input, language-richness, and parents’ educational background in predicting Iranian immigrants’ speaking fluency, accuracy, complexity, and pronunciation. Homogenized through the CELPIP-General Test, 108 Iranian intermediate EFL learners in Canada were selected based on the availability sampling to complete the Alberta Language Environment Questionnaire (ALEQ) and participated in a speaking test. The performances were assessed based on Wigglesworth and Storch’s (2009) fluency, Storch and Wigglesworth’s (2007) accuracy, and Skehan’s (2009) complexity. Pronunciation was measured according to Jenkins’ (2000) Lingua Franca Core (LFC). The structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and the schematic illustration confirmed the hypothesized model (x^2⁄df= .037 RMSEA=.043; RMR =.01; GFI = .95; AGFI =.74; NFI =.70; CFI =.79; IFI =.88; TLI=.89) revealing that age of arrival (AoA), schooling in L2, and language-rich activities could predict fluency, accuracy, complexity, and pronunciation, however, LoR was a significant predictor of neither complexity nor pronunciation. While siblings' input/output could predict only speaking accuracy, maternal education significantly predicted speaking complexity. The findings supported the Critical Period Hypothesis, the significant role of AoA in the development of bilingualism, and the effectiveness of L2 instruction. The results confirmed the direction of the path model exposing the inefficacy of paternal and maternal education and parents' input/output in predicting the variances in immigrants' speaking ability. The findings suggested that parents maximize the number of activities in the second language and migrate to second-language countries before their children’s critical age.

Despite the importance of humor as one of the cultural and social elements, most studies in this field have examined humor out of its context, mainly limited to the analysis of canned jokes, whereas conversational humor is the product of a common interaction between the speaker and the audience. In light of this limitation, the present study sought to investigate the conversational humor in Persian. The data were randomly collected from an Iranian talkshow called Doorehmi which was aired on Nasim television channel in 2018. Then, the conversations between the host and the male and female guests were analyzed based on Dynel’s (2009) framework of conversational humor. The results showed that male guests used more humor strategies (n=258) than femal guests (n=220).  Moreover, male guests used more witticism, anecdotes and banter compared to female guests, while female guests employed banter, witticism, anecdotes and self-denigration more than male guests in their conversations. Also, the guests did not use the put-down strategy in their interaction with the male host, and self-denigration was absent in the discourse of the male host.

The present study, utilizing a descriptive approach and quantitative analysis, analyzed questions in the political interviews in Iran and the United States in order to show what types of adversarial are used in the journalists’ questions and whether there are differences in the use of adversarial between Iranian and American journalists. To this end, the questions addressing the presidents in Iran (i.e. Presidents AhmadiNejad and Roohani) and presidents in the US (i.e. Presidents Obama and Trump), around 70 journalists (35 in each corpus) in political press conference, were randomly collected from 2012 to 2017. The data were then analyzed based Clayman et al.’s (2006) framework to examine how language is used to express adversarial questions. The findings showed that preface tilt was significantly used more in American corpus while other-referencing frames and global adversarial were significantly used more in Iranian corpus. Moreover, in the two corpora, negative questions were the least frequently used type of question and declarative questions was absent in American corpus.

The aim of this cross-cultural study is to investigate conflict management in computer-mediated communication, and to examine users' strategies in online polylogue interaction in response to the posts of LGBTQ groups in the virtual pages of the group's supporters on Instagram. The corpus consisted of 20 Instagram posts with 2071 Persian comments and 1323 English comments collected from July to October 2018, and were analyzed based on Bou-Franch and Blivich's (2014) model of   conflict management. The findings showed that defensive/offensive strategies were the most frequently used strategies, which indicated that users in both groups decided to respond to an action that threatened their face or identity. In addition, the frequency of opposing and withdrawing strategies has been higher in Persian than English corpus. Also, the results of inferential statistics show that, in general, the total number of Persian strategies is significantly higher than English, which can be due to its challenging issue and acceptance status in Iranian society.

In the language teaching and learning context, with the increase in communicative language teaching theories worldwide, the use of video as an audio-visual material has proliferated (Bal-Gezegin, 2014). Nowadays, many publishers produce language learning videos tailored specifically for students in a foreign language program to accompany and complete textbooks. Videos are multimodal because they rely on various semiotic modes or sources (language, gesture, visual imagery, movement, color, music, sounds, and so on). Videos can act as powerful elements in creating learners' knowledge of the real world (Katchen, 2002, as cited BalGezegin, 2014). Despite the abundance of research on images (e.g., Elmiana, 2019; Roohani & Saeidfar, 2013, Tahririan & Sadri, 2013, to name but a few), research on other kinds of visual materials such as videos has received scant attention. Considering the possible effects of videos on constructing learners' views and their psychological effects on the mind of learners, this study aims to analyze the elements of the Rasa Persian teaching video series (hence, RPTVS) created for non-Iranian Persian language learners from a social semiotic perspective. Accordingly, the research questions which guided this study are (1) What is the function of visual aspects in RPTVS?, (2) In what way do the visual aspects of RPTVS support interaction between learners and represented participants? To answer the research questions, three Rasa videos were randomly selected and analyzed based on Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) three-fold metafunction of visual grammar. The materials selected for analysis in this study were the language teaching videos which accompany the Rasa series, for teaching Persian to non-Persian speakers, authored by Shirmohammdi and published in Iran by Al-Mustafa International University in 2012. Al-Mustafa University, established to promote and advance Persian language-learning worldwide for nonPersian speakers, is an international academic, Islamic, and Howzawi Institute in Qom, Iran. RPTVS comes in soft copy featuring 21 units on the whole with each unit accompanying one or two videos related to the particular topic of that unit. It should be mentioned here that the Fundamental level has been chosen because examination of all the levels was beyond the scope of this study and more importantly, the Rasa series is just at the elementary level. The details of the qualitatively analyzed videos were described separately based on the components of visual grammar, namely representational, interactional, and compositional meanings. In response to the first research question, i.e., the function of visual aspects in RPTVS, the findings of the study showed that the visual elements of RPTVS had a naturalistic and humanistic trend. In other words, RPTVS represents the participants in familiar and factual ways. Moreover, all human characters were adults, which might show that the videos were designed for adult users. Regarding the settings and locations, RPTVS portrays common objects which were familiar to students/learners; however, the selection of objects and locations seem somewhat outdated and outstripped by the Iranian lifestyle at present. The represented objects (e.g., clock, Television sets, sofas, tables and many more) are portrayed in ways that could hardly associate with the current life-ways of the Iranian people. Therefore, RPTVS did not show any indications of recent technological improvements in current Iranian society. The findings were in line with Tahririan and Sadri's (2013) findings in which Iranian high school old textbooks used outdated portrayal of objects, overdramatized national identity with poor modality and used grayscale printing. In response to the second research question which was to investigate whether the visual aspects of RPTVS support interaction between learners and represented participants, the results indicate that in the videos of the RPTVS, the medium shot is used more frequently. In this fashion, it can be concluded that the language learners are supposed to keep a personal relationship with the participants as much as possible. The most common contact in videos is the gaze of represented participants toward each other, which shows that represented participants are communicating and encouraging the learners to communicate. Moreover, the results show all visual elements form a demand video through their gaze. In terms of contextualization, the study showed that all videos contained background, except few scenes with a blank background. However, the videos represented real-life activities, which is in line with Ahmadi et al.’s (2020) study of Persian learning textbooks in which the images contained real-life activities to introduce Iranian social life at the national level. Thus, the analysis of the videos based on contextualization modality indicates that theyrepresent authentic meaning in real-life settings. The results of this study suggest that locally developed materials for language teaching, be it teaching English to Iranian learners or Persian to international students, share a lot of similarities in transmitting language and cultural norms to learners, which distinguish it from international publications such as Touchstone or Interchange series. Specifically, Iranian locally developed materials display substantial commonality in terms of culture load. The major implication of this finding is that to enhance the efficacy of the content, instructors need to raise international learners' cognizance of the intricacies, customs, traditions, and values in the Persian culture which make it unique and different in its own right.

Over the last decade, the fields of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics have witnessed a growing interest in research on linguistic landscape. In this connection, numerous studies have investigated language and linguistic signs as used in the living environment. This study was an attempt to explore shop owners' attitudes towards naming their businesses in two areas of high and low social class in Esfahan. To this end, the data were collected from 100 shop owners by means of a questionnaire in the form of likert and a structured interview. The questionnaire was adopted and modified from Hussein, Nofal and Mansour’s (2015) study. It was employed to elicit factors governing the choice of names for businesses in the two areas of high and low socioeconomic status in Esfahan. Owners' attitude towards naming their shops as influenced by language, religion, location and social status has been investigated.The findings showed that there are statistically significant differences between the low and high socioeconomic status groups with regard to the criteria for naming businesses.