A Contrastive Genre Analysis of Persian and English Death Notices

Genre-based approaches to language learning and teaching has recently come to the foreas an illuminating window to the pedagogical practices in education and a reminder of sociallybasedfunction of language and also as a lending tenet to interactional competence. Contrastivegenre analysis is a new developing apparatus of investigation into cross-cultural norms andconventions of discourse. This paper sought to probe into the generic structures of Persian andEnglish death notices published in the Press. For this purpose, 30 samples of death notices inPersian and English gleaned from online newspapers were paralleled against each other. It wasfound out that in some general and specific domains, there are discrepancies and similaritiesbetween Persian and English death announcements while the English obituaries are entirelydifferent. This study contributes to distinctive socio-cultural features of both languages andconsolidates culture as a cinderella term in language learning skills.

Keywords:

genre , move , death notice/announcement , genre analysis