The Use of Persuasive Strategies In Academic Discourse

پوختە

As the key component of success and achievement, persuasive strategies are used in academic discourse. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how persuasive strategies are employed in academic discourse for achieving development and success. In this research, a mixed-method is used to collect data, and the researcher adopted Connor and Lauer's (1985) theory to analyze the data. The data of this paper consists of three public academic speeches, delivered on the same occasion 'Graduation Ceremony' by the rectors of three top universities; Dr Muslih Mustafa previous president of Soran University, Dr Bruce W. Ferguson president of American University of Sulaimani and Dr Dawood Sulaiman Atrushi president of Duhok University, in Kurdistan Region, ranked as first, second and third, according to UniRank (2021). Despite facing some challenges, the findings of this study demonstrated that the three rectors have a positive attitude towards the use of persuasive strategies. That is, they employed persuasive strategies, but they treated them differently in their speeches, as significant tools for encouraging their university staff to do more research with high quality and having considerable citations which in turn resulted in having topped the identified universities via meeting the UniRank selection criteria during the academic year of 2020-2021.