Mood Grammatical Metaphors in Listening Module of TOEFL Books: A Systemic Functional Grammar approach

The present research aims to describe and analyze the Interpersonal Grammatical Metaphors of Mood in the listening module of TOEFL official books, in the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). And it attempts to find an answer to the question that to what extent TOEFL has been able to benefit from Mood Grammatical Metaphor as a basic concept in Functional Linguistics which is a communicative-based approach to study languages, and it claims that Grammatical Metaphor is a property of scientific texts. The research approach was qualitative content analysis, and the data were collected using the documentary method. In this regard, three official TOEFL iBT books, including a total of fourteen tests were selected. The listening module of each test entails six texts in the form of conversation and lecture. First, clauses of the total of 84 texts were identified and examined separately. Then, Mood Grammatical Metaphors were identified in each text and compared in terms of the type and frequency. The findings indicated that: 1. there were higher frequency of Mood Metaphors in the conversation texts than the lecture texts of listening module, 2. In terms of the types of Mood Grammatical Metaphors, the use of the indicative and interrogative moods, which were the metaphorical representation of imperative clauses, had the highest frequency compared to other types of Mood Grammatical Metaphors, respectively. It can be said that Face saving and Politeness cause individuals to avoid using imperative mood. Awareness of Grammatical Metaphor types and its explicit instruction teaching, can help language learners increase their pragmatic competence, and yield better results in assessment knowledge.