ناصر رشیدی

Although Gardner and his associates’ work was most influential in the field of L2 motivation, from the early 1990s onwards, their work has been criticized for several reasons. Some researchers claimed that integrative and instrumental orientations were no longer able to convey the complexity of the L2 motivation construct. To examine this complexity, the present study attempted to investigate the discursive construction of four (two males and two females) Iranian EFL learners’ motivation at Shiraz University, Iran. Employing van Leeuwen’s (2008) legitimation construction framework, the study revealed that depending on their future selves, each participant employed certain discursive strategies unique to him/her to (de)legitimize his/her future self. Therefore, what was observed was the use of strategies which were idiosyncratic to that particular person, in that particular context, for a specific purpose, and for that particular moment. Additionally, given the unique political conditions of Iran in the world, it was found that integrative and instrumental orientations can be best replaced by ideal and ought-to selves in this context. The study has some implications. Motivation researchers need to broaden the unit of analysis beyond the individual learner to the interaction between the individual and the multitude of factors in diverse social settings.

The extensive research done on the interrelationship between different social factors such as social class، gender and age and different linguistic variables has shown that these factors have important effects on the way language is used. Among these factors a special importance can be placed on age due to the role it plays in revealing different patterns of language use، such as the age-grading pattern، the normal pattern of age differentiation and the important patterns of language change which can inform us about the emergence of a linguistic form or the death of some old form. This paper is intended to examine the interrelationship between age and the usage of Shirazi vocabulary or lexical items. Sixty respondents belonging to 6 age groups of Shirazi speakers answered a 60-item questionnaire. Each item included one Shirazi word with its definition and sometimes a short example to clarify its meaning. The respondents had to choose between two choices: either they used the item or they did not. The analysis of the results showed that age was an influencing factor on the speech of the speakers as the older people had a large collection of active Shirazi words (they actively used all the words) while the younger generation had two collections of more active and less active Shirazi words and as the age of the subjects increased their mean scores which represented their usage of Shirazi vocabulary items also increased. These words were also used less among the more educated Shirazi speakers.