Interactional Resources in Letters of Iranian Elementary Young EFL Learners in Farsi and English

The basic function of any languages is to build up a relationship with others and this linguistic function requires particular attention among school children. In school contexts, young learners are expected to be able to express attitudes, feelings and opinions to gradually develop a sense of the other in their writing. This study examined young learners use of interactional resources in writing letters to a friend in Farsi (L1) and English (FL). The purpose of this study was to ascertain, i) whether the language used in letter writing, ii) whether the gender of the learners influenced on the length of text production and iii) to what extent they used interactional meanings in their letters. This study used 60 English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners whose ages range between 11 and 13, (30 girls and 30 boys) voluntarily. The letters were written in both Farsi and English languages, respectively but three weeks apart. The texts were analyzed in terms of both content and discourse semantic expression, drawing on a Systemic Functional Linguistic Framework known as Appraisal. The finding shows that both boys’ and girls’ text production in their L1 was more than their text production in their FL and girls used more aspects of text production (i.e., number of c-units and characters) than the boys did. The finding also indicates that information about people was mostly used in both languages, but the difference was that girls included more information about school in FL than L1

Keywords:

Young learner , Interactional resource , Appraisal theory , Farsi (L1) , English (FL) , Gender