Enhancing Red Notice Writing through Genre-Based Pedagogy: A Mixed-Methods Repeated-Measures Evaluation with NCB Tehran Officers

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

2 Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

10.22111/ijals.2026.54020.2577

Abstract

This study evaluated the impact of genre-based pedagogy on the quality of Red Notices (RNs) drafted by officers of Iran’s National Central Bureau (NCB), a high-stakes institutional genre central to international police cooperation. An instructional program grounded in Swales’s genre theory and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and operationalized through a five-move, CARS-informed scheme, was implemented over a five-week workshop. Using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, the quantitative strand employed a one-group repeated-measures design with 30 NCB officers who completed RN drafting tasks at pre-test, post-test, and delayed post-test. Repeated-measures ANOVAs indicated a significant main effect of time, with large gains in overall RN writing performance from pre- to post-intervention that were substantially maintained at delay (e.g., F(2, 58) ≈ 200, p < .001, partial         η² ≈ .87). Improvements were evident in macrostructural organization, lexico-grammatical accuracy, cohesion, and compliance with institutional conventions. In the qualitative strand, semi-structured interviews with 10 officers highlighted increased awareness of RN move structure, more deliberate use of legal modality and nominalization, and perceived transfer of genre knowledge to routine drafting under time and institutional constraints. Findings support the incorporation of explicit, genre-based instructional design into law-enforcement training to strengthen institutional genre writing and enhance the clarity and reliability of transnational police communication.

Keywords

References

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Iranian Journal of Applied Language Studies
Volume 18, Issue 1
July 2026
Pages 151-180

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