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چکیده
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In recent years and in Iranian universities, some of the university students, predicting that they might receive low grades, write a kind of "grade appeal letter" at the end of their final exam answer sheets. This enclosed "letter" is exclusively addressed to the teacher. Apart from other determining socio-cultural factors, this research attempts to study this academic phenomenon in the light of Category Membership Analysis (CMA), genre and rhetorical analysis, and discourse analysis. To this end, it collected 30 samples from universities of Zanjan and Kurdistan. The results indicate that students' grade appeal letter, despite being informal, has over the course of time found its own structure e.g. excuses, justifications, request. In other words, it has formal sections such as Greetings, Title, Address, Request, and Acknowledgements. Moreover, the student attempts to categorize themselves in different ways and associate themselves with different activities, practices and discourses to account for their own failure in the exams. Furthermore, they, through invented data and means of persuasion, try to convince university teachers to sympathize with them and assist them in passing the course. This "letter" borders on formality, hesitancy, and equality and accommodation theory. The implications of this study might be of help to the experts in higher education and teachers to a find a way of dealing with this academic practice so to make it rule-governed and authorized. Fourth
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