A comparative sociopragmatic analysis of wedding invitations in American and Iranian societies and teaching implications

Wedding invitations (WIs), as a uniquely socially and culturally constructed genre, provide a distinct opportunity to compare the sociocultural values of different speech communities as reflected in the textual content and organization of the different moves. Students can be exposed to this genre and its different moves using a genre-based pedagogy. Genre-based pedagogy can be used to provide the learners with an opportunity to study well-known genres in their first (L1) and second language (L2) and to be able to observe the common and distinctive moves from a cross-cultural, cross-linguistic perspective. This study was carried out to investigate the wedding invitations in American and Iranian societies through two complementary approaches: genre analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA). One hundred wedding invitation (WI) cards (50 from each society) were collected and analyzed comparatively. The findings from the genre analysis showed that the WIs of the two speech communities enjoyed both similarities and differences in their generic moves. Results of CDA indicated that traditional orientation, religious affiliation, masculine power and educational status were the most influential factors affecting WIs in both societies but the intensity of the effect of these factors were not similar in the two speech communities. The results of this study sheds light on sociocultural forces dominating Iranian and American language communities.