Innovation in Language Learning

The growing influence of social media influencers in the contemporary digital landscape has become markedly apparent within society. Influencers possess the capacity to shape public thought and behavior. Their presentation of opinions and ideologies renders their discourse a significant subject for scholarly investigation. This is particularly relevant to examining the ways in which they employ the rhetoric of empowerment, encouragement, and inspiration, as well as the strategies through which they construct solidarity with their audience.

The aims of the study are identifying the syntactic, semantic and rhetorical strategies, uncovering the cognitive mechanisms how each speaker builds positive context models, activates shared social knowledge, extracting the major ideologies promoted by each speaker. The study hypothesizes that Osteen and Al Fiki uses three important linguistic strategies (syntactic, semantic and rhetoric) that strength the positivity and which the most frequent tools in each level are (pronouns, lexicalization and discourse markers), it also hypothesizes that the two shows construct three positive strategies (empowerment, encouragement, inspiration and how they show their solidarity with their audience.

The present study adopts a Socio-Cognitive framework within Critical Discourse Analysis, yet it diverges from the dominant critical stance by adopting a positive perspective. It investigates two prominent self-help and motivational television programs: _The Message_ and _Umsiat Al-Najah. Given the absence of prior linguistic research on these programs, this study seeks to address this gap by exploring how discourse functions as a mediator between societal structures and cognitive processes. Furthermore, it aims to identify the specific types of positive ideologies utilized to motivate viewers.

In order to accomplish the objectives of the study and test its hypotheses, two methodological procedures are employed: a theoretical framework and a practical analysis.

To achieve the aim of the study and verify its hypotheses, two types of procedures are chosen: theoretical and practical. The theoretical procedure includes presenting the theoretical background of discourse definition, discourse with positive notions, a theoretical background of discourse analysis, types of discourse, critical discourse analysis, CDA and Cognitive linguistics, major approaches of CDA, Van Dijk SCA and some related previous studies. While the practical side involves two parts: the first part includes the qualitative method which concentrates on the analysis of eight episodes of the two TV shows which has been selected from the You Tube platform. The second part involves quantitative method which involves doing tables to make statistics and figures to show the differences that have been found in two different cultures. The American episodes of The Message show is analyzed first, then the Arab episodes are analyzed. The comparison between the result to find out the similarities and differences in specific points.

To test these hypotheses, the research employs (mixed methods) qualitative and quantitative analysis, the study develops an eclectic analytical model to investigate the data of eight episodes, four to each show, they are analyzed across three levels of Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach (2006, 2009, 2016) with Fairclough (1992) and Quirk et. al (1985), discourse level involves (syntactic, semantic, rhetoric), cognitive level includes (personal cognition and social cognition) and social level which involves (overall societal structure and power domination).

Keywords: PDA, socio-cognitive , CDA, Persuasive, Osteen, Al Fiki, motivational, empowerment, solidarity, cross-cultural comparison