Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics, Department of English Language and Literature, Payame Noor University.

2 MA in English Language Teaching, Department of English Language and Literature, Payame Noor University

Abstract

The aim of this cross-cultural study is to investigate conflict management in computer-mediated communication, and to examine users' strategies in online polylogue interaction in response to the posts of LGBTQ groups in the virtual pages of the group's supporters on Instagram. The corpus consisted of 20 Instagram posts with 2071 Persian comments and 1323 English comments collected from July to October 2018, and were analyzed based on Bou-Franch and Blivich's (2014) model of   conflict management. The findings showed that defensive/offensive strategies were the most frequently used strategies, which indicated that users in both groups decided to respond to an action that threatened their face or identity. In addition, the frequency of opposing and withdrawing strategies has been higher in Persian than English corpus. Also, the results of inferential statistics show that, in general, the total number of Persian strategies is significantly higher than English, which can be due to its challenging issue and acceptance status in Iranian society.

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