A Contrastive Analysis of Emotional Terms in Bed-Night Stories Across Two Languages: Does it Affect Learners' Pragmatic
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A Contrastive Analysis of Emotional Terms in Bed‑Night Stories Across Two Languages: Does it Affect Learners’ Pragmatic Knowledge of Controlling Emotions? Seeking Implications to Teach English to EFL Learners Ehsan Namaziandost1 · Mohammad Hasan Razmi2 · Shadi Heidari3 · Shouket Ahmad Tilwani4 Accepted: 5 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The present investigation aimed at studying emotional terms (ETs) in Persian and English bed-night stories for children by adopting a contrastive analysis approach within two phases. Emotional terms were categorized into two theoretical models (tokens and types) in phase one of the study, and in the second phase, the effect of teaching emotive narratives on learners’ pragmatic knowledge of controlling emotions was scrutinized. To this aim, 30 English bed-night stories (15 in English and 15 in Persian) with similar lengths and difficulty levels were selected randomly. In the first phase of the study, the frequency of occurrence of emotional terms (ETs) in English and Persian English bed-night stories were compared. The results indicated that there were not statistically significant differences between the two groups of stories in terms of the emotion tokens utilized in both languages. Nevertheless, there was a major disparity in the number of ETs found in English and Persian bed-night tales concerning various types of emotions. During the second phase of the study, a group of 25 EFL learners were explicitly taught emotive English bed-night tales. A pre-test post-test design using a Discourse Completion Test was used to seek the efficacy of teaching ETs on the learners’ pragmatic knowledge of controlling emotions. Findings showed that teaching emotive narratives enhanced students’ pragmatic knowledge of emotions significantly. In light of the findings of the study, a number of conclusions are drawn and the implications are discussed. Keywords Bed-night stories · Contrastive analysis · EFL learners · Emotional terms · Pragmatic knowledge of emotions
* Ehsan Namaziandost [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
Introduction The relationship between language and emotion can be seen from two perspectives. Firstly, language can be seen in a broad sense as emotive (Kövecses 1990; Pekrun 2014; Wierzbicka 1994, 1995, 1997). From this perspective, individuals often exhibit emotions in various circumstances and this significantly affects the communicative situations in a variety of ways (Marsh 2013). These significant effects may occur even extra-linguistically (e.g. through facial expressions and body language, Pavlenko 2002), or in terms of supra-segmental and prosodic attributes, and linguistic forms (Singh et al. 2016). Since research in this area revolves mainly around the expression of emotions, the literature relies heavily on perceptions of what feelings are and how they function in learning contexts (Pekrun 20
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