A Contrastive Genre Analysis of Persian and English Death Notices

Genre-based approaches to language learning and teaching has recently come to the fore as an illuminating window to the pedagogical practices in education and a reminder of sociallybased function of language and also as a lending tenet to interactional competence. Contrastive genre analysis is a new developing apparatus of investigation into cross-cultural norms and conventions of discourse. This paper sought to probe into the generic structures of Persian and English death notices published in the Press. For this purpose, 30 samples of death notices in Persian and English gleaned from online newspapers were paralleled against each other. It was found out that in some general and specific domains, there are discrepancies and similarities between Persian and English death announcements while the English obituaries are entirely different. This study contributes to distinctive socio-cultural features of both languages and consolidates culture as a cinderella term in language learning skills.