A Positive Discourse Approach to the Arabic Facebook Posts of Two Egyptian Relationship Skills Coaches

Abstract

Relationship skills coaching is a kind of psychotherapy that helps people to communicate in a healthier way. It helps with personal problems and issues such as, for example: trust, lying, respect, anger-management, communication, conflict, power struggles, abuse, jealousy, romance, intimacy, parenting, in-laws, divorce, loneliness, stress, fear, anxiety, depression, and so on. Currently, relationship skills coaching is becoming a trendy profession in Egypt and many coaches are becoming famous. Many of these coaches communicate with people using their Facebook pages. This paper focuses mainly on a selection of the Facebook posts of two coaches, namely, Howayda Aldemerdash and Waleed Khairy. The study provides a positive discourse analysis (PDA) (Martin, 1995, 2004, 2006) of the selected posts. PDA emphasises the function of discourse construction in motivating change into a better world. The theoretical basis of PDA is Appraisal theory, which focuses on the evaluative resources in discourse and is comprised of three sub-systems: Attitude (people’s feelings and evaluations), Engagement (the voices of the author and texts) and the Graduation system (the different levels and gradability of evaluation). The study provides a significant application of PDA to Arabic discourse and sheds light on the nature of relationship skills coaching in Egypt. The analysis shows that Waleed Khairy deals with issues related to love and trust; whereas Howayda Aldemerdash focuses on the relationship between couples and marital problems. However, both coaches employ the three sub-systems of Appraisal theory to reach out to their followers and construct themselves as authoritative, expert, engaged, and emotional.

Received: 19 November 2022 / Accepted: 15 February 2023 / Published: 5 March 2023