A Comparative Study of Dialogistic Language Employed by English and Persian Writers in Academic Writing

Academic writing is typically encoded by relatively negotiable and arguable resources indicating the potentially dialogistic nature of its discourse community, and has been the area of investigation from different perspectives. One of these perspectives has been the way that determines dialogistic resources in the rhetorical formation of textbooks. Thus, this study is conducted to explore and explain the strategies which are applied by writers to expand or contract the dialogistic voices of written texts. To this end, four texts of applied linguistics writers, two Persian and two English, were selected and then analyzed on the proposed framework of the appraisal by Martin and White (2005), particularly the one which is about engagement. Results showed that this dialogistic positioning, i.e., engagement, is relatively equally favored by both English and Persian applied linguists which indicate that both English and Persian writers are inclined to establish and maintain writer/reader interactional relationship, make allowance for other voices, and observe collegial deference. In respect to the subcategories of engagement, the result showed that in both English and Persian textbooks writers show a marked difference for coding engagement as entertain than other subcategories. The reason comes from the fact that by utilizing instances of entertain the writer indicates its position is but one of possible positions, so makes dialogistic space for any other possibilities.