Journal of Research in Applied Linguistics
Volume:10 Issue: 1, Winter-Spring 2019

The study analyzes the apology delivered by the then-democratic Presidential contender in 2007, Senator Barack H. Obama, to the Indian-American community. This apology succeeded in convincing American citizens of Obama’s goodwill and clean political standards, which eventually led him to surpass his chief opponent, Senator Hillary R. Clinton and become the President of the United States. The study employs Searle’s (1969) speech act theory (SAT) and Holmes’s (1990) apology strategies through pragmatics. The study, then, administrates thematic analysis through positive discourse analysis to gain insights from Obama’s leadership values. Findings educate readers on the importance of an apology construction and encourage readers to follow the example of a world-class leader’s values by having an insight into Obama’s leadership.

Based on psychophysiological research, coherent heart-brain interaction can change afferent cardiac signal pattern sent to the brain. Accordingly, the present study aimed at facilitating the emotion-cognition interaction through HeartMath Institute self-regulated emotional techniques to investigate the efficacy of heart-brain coherence on reading anxiety reduction that significantly enhances attention, memory, comprehension, and efficiency in learning. Participants were 63 Iranian university and high school students. In order to enable the participants to self-generate high psychophysiological state and optimal heart rate variability (HRV), TestEdge program, a biofeedback remedy that teaches students skills to self-regulate negative emotional learning impediments, was administered. Findings indicated that the combination of intentional heart focus with the generation of sustained positive feelings increased heart-brain coherence and resulted in a beneficial mode of psychophysiological state. This heart-brain coherence affected and controlled the HRV patterns significantly among the participants on average which, in turn, reduced reading anxiety. Particularly, this study found significant differences among the EFL students with high, mid, and low levels of coherence and their reading anxiety level.

This study examined Omani EFL learners’ perceptions toward their willingness to communicate (WTC) in English. To this end, 204 students majoring in English language at a private university in Oman were assigned a questionnaire adapted from McCroskey’s (1992) WTC scale to determine possible effects of communication and affective variables on their WTC in English. After assessing the normality distribution of the data and the reliabilities of the scales, descriptive analyses were used to characterize the participants’ WTC. Also, repeated measures ANOVA analyses were conducted to measure the effect of different interlocutor types and the context type on the participants’ WTC. Overall, the results showed that the Omani students had fairly low WTC in English. Their WTC significantly varied based on the interlocutor types and the context types. It was also found that the participants had moderate motivation to learn EFL and positive attitudes toward English learning situations and the L1 community.

Academic writing is no longer considered an objective and impersonal form of discourse. It is now seen as an attempt involving interaction between writers and readers; hence, academics are not only required to produce texts representing external realities but also to use language to recognize, build, and exchange social relations. The present study aimed to analyze how native English speakers, Ph.D. candidates in TEFL, position their texts intertextually when writing their doctoral dissertation Discussion sections. To this end, 5 Discussion sections were selected and analyzed in detail based on the Engagement subsystem of the appraisal model.  Hence, the type and frequency of every Engagement resource were identified and its functionalities were explicated. Results indicated that the examined writers could easily engage themselves in dialogue with their potential interlocutors. Also, they preferred to limit the possibility of being rejected or challenged by using dialogically contractive Engagement resources almost twice as many as dialogically expansive ones. Moreover, it was found that, although these authors developed their Discussion sections in a dialogistically contractive way, they provided enough space for the consideration of alternative viewpoints.

This study aimed to investigate the disciplinary and cross-disciplinary variations of research article Introduction sections in 2 disciplines (i.e., humanities and basic sciences). Ninety research article Introduction sections (i.e., 15 from each discipline of applied linguistics, sociology, psychology, biology, agriculture, and geology) were examined. The study was conducted with reference to the onion model of discourse analysis developed by Humphrey and Economou (2015), and the data were coded by MAXQDA10. Results pointed to a general underlying pattern that moved from descriptive and taxonomic reports to more challenging genres like persuasion and critique, regardless of the disciplines. Findings, however, indicated that individual disciplines manifested their own systematic regularities in terms of rhetorical conventions of writing. Besides, the process of knowledge-making was reflected and reinforced through lexicogrammatical and appraisal resources. The study has implications both for teaching and materials development.

Institutional identity as a concept in CDA is a field of study that deals with the identities that individuals in institutions obtain, one that merits deep research attention. News interviews as institutional instances can be analyzed based on the impersonal structures because interviewees see themselves as part of the institution and they may not take responsibility when they encounter problematic topics. In this study, Benwell and Stokoe’s (2006) concepts of institutional identities and impersonal structures (i.e., existential processes, nominalizations, passivizations, and relational processes) and Halliday’s (2004) transitivity system were used. Results indicated that relational processes and nominalizations have the highest and the lowest frequencies in English news interviews and in Persian news interviews; relational processes and existential processes have the highest and lowest frequencies, respectively.

This study aimed at exploring the ontological indeterminacies of The Sea (2005), a novel by John Banville using the postmodern catena put forth by Ihab Hassan. Hassan’s catalogue of the features of postmodern fiction includes indeterminacy, fragmentation, decanonization, selflessness, depthlessness, the unpresentable/unrepresentable, irony, hybridization, carnivalization, performance, participation, constructionism, and immanence. In the present study, the use of each of these traits was traced in the novel and the appropriateness of these techniques with regard to the world of the novel was studied. Max Morden, the protagonist, desperately excavates his memories in search of a meaning for life, but in vain. The postmodern features incorporated in the narrative of the novel help uncover the inconsistencies of the subject’s mind when faced with an indeterminate world.