چكيده
Internet-mediated communication has revolutionized the world at large, attracting millions of people from similar and different sociolinguistic backgrounds to communicate and express their thoughts, feelings and needs. Currently, as a popular social media Instagram is an application that is in great demand by the public. Like communicating verbally, people are required both to acquire the language and to have the knowledge to use the language they acquired in order to communicate on social platforms. Speech acts are a way to conceptualize the individuals’ action. As a speech act, criticism is commonly used by people in almost all cultures. This holds true for communication on any social networks, including social media platforms. This cross-cultural study presents a comparative investigation of the strategies used by Persian and English users of Instagram in employing speech act of criticism. To do this investigation, 200 massages from the selected Instagram pages were chosen from English native and Persian native users’, including 100 English users and 100 Persian users. An adapted version of Nguyen’s (2005) framework of criticism strategies was used to analyze the data. To reveal the differences between Persian and English users, the Chi-square test was used. Results indicated that the most frequent direct strategies for criticism used by Persian users included negative evaluation, severe criticism and identification of the problem, respectively. In contrast, the findings showed that the most frequent direct strategies for criticism used by English users were Statement of difficulty, severe criticism, expression of disagreement and disapproval. The findings also indicate the two languages were also different especially for the statement of the problem and expression of uncertainty. The outcomes are of pedagogical significance in that educators may use criticism speech acts to further raise intricacies involved in performing speech acts and in particular different manifestations of speech acts in diverse cultures.
