Background

I am a PhD candidate at Department of Language and Literature. I have an MA in Language and Culture in Europe from Linköping University as well as an MBA from Iranian Industrial Management Institute. I have 18 years of experience in teaching English, training teachers, managing, and quality control in language institutes.

My doctoral project

My project has its basis in argumentation, corpus linguistics, applied linguistics, and intercultural rhetoric. I am doing a mixed method study which consists of qualitative study of the argumentative behavior of university students with different cultural background writing in English in order to communicate with the international academic community. The quantitative aspect of the project focuses on statistical analyses of the frequency of the argumentative indicators used by these university students to highlight their performance in regard to the linguistic characterization of argumentation structure.

university students with different cultural background. I do intercultural rhetoric analysis on the argumentative texts written by university students with different cultural and linguistic background, i.e., speakers of Persian, Norwegian and English. The focus of my study is on the argumentative behavior of these students and statistical analysis of the frequency of the argumentative indicators. I am investigating 'rhetorical constructions' that are used by each group in search for meaningful rhetorical patterns in L2 English argumentative texts and the way these patterns are realized linguistically.

My goal is to provide help to improve the quality of argumentative writing by each group. I hope my research can help in policy making in language education and provide more effective strategies for teaching students how to argue more effectively through their texts.

Professional interests:

• Argumentation
• Applied Linguistics
• Corpus linguistics
• Intercultural Rhetoric
• Second language research and pedagogy