Mood Grammatical Metaphors in the Listening Module of TOEFL Books: A Systemic Functional Grammar Approach

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

• Rouhollah Yaghoubi ¹
• Ferdows Aghagolzadeh ²

¹ The candidate of Ph.D. in Linguistics, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

² Linguistics Dept., Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

https://doi.org/10.22067/jlkd.2022.77897.1113

Abstract

The present research aims to describe and analyze the Interpersonal Grammatical Metaphors of Mood in the listening module of TOEFL official books, in the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). It attempts to ascertain an answer to the following question: “To what extent has TOEFL been able to benefit from Mood Grammatical Metaphor as a primary concept in Functional Linguistics?”, as we know it is a communicative-based approach to study languages, and it claims that Grammatical Metaphor is a trait of scientific texts. The research method was based on qualitative content analysis, and documentary method of data collection was employed. In this regard, three official TOEFL iBT books, including a total of fourteen tests were selected. The listening module of each test entails six texts in the form of conversations and lectures. First, each clause of the total of 84 texts was identified and examined separately. Then, Mood Grammatical Metaphors were extracted from each text and compared in terms of the type and frequency. The findings indicated that: 1. there was a higher frequency of Mood Metaphors in the conversation texts than in the lecture texts of the listening module, 2. In terms of the types of Mood Grammatical Metaphors, the use of the indicative and interrogative moods, which were the metaphorical representation of imperative clauses, had the highest frequency compared to other types of Mood Grammatical Metaphors, respectively. It can be said that Face Saving and Politeness strategies cause individuals to avoid using the imperative mood. It is crucial to raise awareness of the Grammatical Metaphor concept and use its explicit instruction teaching so that it can help language learners improve their communicative competence and achieve better results in scientific text comprehension.

Keywords

• Systemic Functional Grammar
• Grammatical Metaphor
• Interpersonal Metafunction
• Mood Metaphor
• TOEFL

Main Subjects

• Linguistics

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