A Qualitative Inquiry into the Illocutionary Speech Acts Performed by Iranian EFL Learners in Facebook

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Lorestan University, Khorramabad, Iran

2 Health Information Technology Research Center, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran

Abstract

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate speech acts performed by Iranian EFL learners on the social network of Facebook in their interaction with their teacher and with their peers in response to divergent and evaluative questions. A page was constructed for the students in order to provide the opportunity for their answering divergent and evaluative questions posed by the researchers. A total of 240 comments including 1680 speech acts were collected from five EFL students during an academic semester. Content analysis of the collected data revealed that participants primarily used expressive speech acts in response to divergent questions and directive speech acts in response to evaluative questions. The results also revealed differences in using emoticons regarding the difference in power relations between the teacher and students. Further findings and implications are discussed in the paper.

Keywords

References

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Iranian Journal of Applied Language Studies
Volume 15, Issue 1
April 2023
Pages 101-116

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