A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE TEXTUAL FEATURES OF IRANIAN AND ENGLISH RECOMMENDATION LETTERS

Analysis of different academic writings to obtain cross-cultural differences, Recommendation Letters (RL) is still considered as a Cinderella among Iranian scholars. Adopting the Clyne's (1991) framework to analyze English recommendation letters written by Iranian, American, Canadian, and British university professors, to see if there is any significant difference between these two types in terms of digression, textual symmetry, integration, advance organizers, enumerative sentences, bridge sentences, and topic sentences, forty-seven RLs were collected in total, 27 of which were written by Iranian university professors and 20 by those native speakers of English. Having analyzed the letters according to those features, a Chi2 test was conducted to demonstrate the results statistically. It was found that there are significant differences between these two groups of letters regarding textual symmetry and topic sentences, while there were no significant differences regarding digression, data integration, advance organizers, enumerative sentences, and bridge sentences.