socio-cognitive approach

The United States with its presidents stepping into power from either the Democratic or Republican parties influences global affairs in one way or another. These two main political parties have long been struggling for power and the significance of tapping into the ideological inclinations of the two parties underscores scholars’ accountability toward raising the critical language awareness of the public which could be an initial step toward a change for the better. The presidential inaugural speeches, due to their programmatic and strategic nature, are of significance to researchers. This study employed van Dijk’s (2006b) socio-cognitive framework where he defined two levels of analyses for a political discourse including the micro-level and macro-level text analyses. The former included 25 discursive devices such as polarization, generalization, hyperbole, etc. The latter drew on the dichotomy of ‘positive self-representation’ and ‘negative other-representation’. In the present study, the linguistic features in 16 inaugural speeches delivered by American Democratic and Republican presidents from 1961 to 2017 were examined at both levels. The overall data analysis revealed that Democrats employed ‘norm expression’ and ‘presupposition’ significantly more than Republicans, while Republicans made more use of ‘categorization’, ‘lexicalization’, and ‘populism’. The macro-level comparison of the two parties indicated that both Democrats and Republicans resorted to using ‘positive self-representation’ significantly more than ‘negative other-representation’ while the deployment of ‘negative other-representation’ by Republicans was significantly more than that by Democrats. The findings of this study have some implications for English for political purposes, political studies, as well as attempts in discourse studies.

The incorporation of applied games in university differentiated language instruction is increasingly prevalent. This interventional study was conducted through non-crossover design in the academic years 2020-2021 among the students of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences. The quantitative and qualitative data were gathered by soliciting participants' attitudes towards English for Specific Purposes writing through (game)-based differentiated instruction, assessing their academic and professional writing, and debriefing their insight into how differentiated instruction might enhance English for Specific Purposes writing. While the quantitative data were analyzed through Wilcoxon signed-rank test and repeated measures ANOVA, the qualitative data were content analyzed through theme-based analysis. It was revealed that mixed reality harnessed the synergy of augmented reality and virtual reality in English for Specific writing education. Findings showed that single-minded preoccupation with a game type undermines the potential of game-based differentiated instruction in English for Specific Purposes writing. The results and implications are explained.