Abstract
Using a contrastive analysis approach, this study aimed to study emotive words (EWs) in Persian and English short stories for children. It actually tries to find the similarities and differences between the two languages in terms of using emotive words based on different types and tokens of emotions introduced by Wierzbicka (Emotions across cultures: Diversity and universality, 1999) and Devon (The origin of emotions, 2006). Additionally, it sought to investigate the impact of teaching emotive narratives on the learners’ practical knowledge of controlling emotions. To fulfill this objective, 20 short stories with similar length and level of difficulty were randomly selected, 10 in English and l0 in Persian, and 35 lines of each story were investigated to identify and classify their EWs based on the two models employed for classification. To examine the extent of similarities and differences between the frequency of EWs used in English and Persian short stories, a Chi-square test was run. The results revealed that there was not a significant difference between the two groups of stories in terms of emotion tokens; however, a significant difference was found between the frequency of EWs used in English and Persian short stories concerning different types of emotion. In the second phase of the study, emotive short stories were explicitly taught to a sample of 25 EFL learners; a DCT was utilized as the pre-test and post-test to find if learners’ practical knowledge would improve in the wake of this intervention. The findings revealed a significant improvement in the practical understanding of the participants after being exposed to the instruction of emotive narratives. The results also demonstrated that literature-based activities containing emotional cues could improve young learners’ practical knowledge required for controlling their emotions.
Highlights
Language is used as a medium to express one’s feelings and ideas
The maximum frequency of emotive words (EWs) in English stories used to describe the first type of emotion called “something good happened”; in Persian stories, the writers used the most frequency of EWs to express the second type of emotion called “something bad happened.”
As presented in the above table, based on the Chi-square test results, there was a statistically significant association between the emotion types and the frequency of EWs used in English and Persian short stories; that is, English and Persian writers used different frequencies of EWS to express different types of emotion (p < .05)
Summary
Language is used as a medium to express one’s feelings and ideas. New ideas from cognitive linguistics, corpus-based, and cultural studies, as well as findings in the first and second language acquisition, experimental psychology, and language evolution, have shed considerable light on the nature of feelings and emotions. The last group of emotions is social emotions related to teachers and peers in the classroom, such as love, sympathy, compassion, admiration, contempt, envy, anger, or social anxiety. These emotions are especially crucial in teacher/student interaction and group learning (Sarıca & Usluel, 2016)
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