ELT VOICES – INDIA The Effect of Social Status on Complaint Strategies by Iranian EFL learners and English native speakers (original) (raw)
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International Journal of English Linguistics, 2016
Speech acts are interesting areas of research and there has been much research on speech acts. Complaint is a type of speech act and how to use it in interaction is important to EFL learners. The complaint strategies employed by Iranian female EFL learners and female English native speakers were compared in this study. Also, the effects of contextual variables (Social distance and Social power) on the choice of complaint strategies by Iranian female EFL learners and female native English speakers were studied in this research. Thirty Iranian female EFL learners and thirty female native English speakers participated in this study. The two instruments which were used in this study included Oxford Placement Test (OPT) and Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The (DCT), as an open-ended questionnaire was administrated to them to elicit complaint speech acts. Then, the collected data were analyzed according to a modified taxonomy of complaint strategies proposed by Trosoborg (1995). The results indicated that there was a significant difference between Iranian female EFL learners and female native English speakers in terms of using complaint strategies. Iranian female EFL learners used indirect complaint, while female native English speakers used the direct complaint more frequently; and contextual variables had a great influence on complaint strategy choice by participants of two groups.
International Journal of English Linguistics, 2017
This study was conducted to investigate the impolite complaint strategies that are used by Iranian EFL learners and native speakers in relation to social distance. This study also aimed at determining if there were significant differences among the strategies used by each group and if there was a significant difference between Iranian native speakers of English. To this end, 40 Iranian EFL learners and 20 Americans who were native speakers of English participated in this study. To make sure about the homogeneity of Iranian participants the Oxford Placement Test (OPT) was conducted. A questionnaire containing 12 different situations was designed by the researchers and was given to the participants to express their complaints for each situation. The results revealed that there were significant differences among the strategies used by each group; the most common strategy that was used by both groups of participants was positive impoliteness and the least common one was bald-on-record. ...
Complaint and Politeness Strategies used by Iranian Speakers of English
Complaint is a face threatening act and it happens when a speaker reacts with anger to things which go wrong or to a speech or an action which affected him/her unfavorably. Therefore, complaints can engender social relationship breakdown. However, a complainer can use politeness when he/ she aims to maintain a good relationship with complainee or to mitigate the severity of his/her complaint and face threat. This study aims to investigate the complaint speech act with regard to the strategies and structure used as well as the politeness strategies employed by Iranian learners in communication with other nationalities in the academic context of a university. Searle's (1969) speech act theory and Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness theory comprised the theoretical framework of the study. The data were elicited through open-ended discourse completion task questionnaire from 50 Iranian learners. The data were analyzed using pragmatics as the approach within discourse analysis. The findings show that Iranians are able to draw on a variety of strategies and structures and adapt them in a flexible manner when faced with various complaint-provoking situations. Culturally, the findings show that Iranians are indirect and exercise negative politeness as they try to minimize the face threatening act of complaining. However, when the situation demands for it, they can be direct in their manner of speech.
Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2014
The purpose of the present article is to make a contrastive cross-cultural pragmatic analysis between Canadian native speakers, Iranian EFL learners, and Iranian native speakers of Persian in regard to the speech act of complaint. To do so, in the first stage, a Nelson Proficiency Test was administered among 20 Canadian university students majoring in different fields,20 among Iranian EFL learners, and 20 among Persian speakers, respectively. Based on the results of this test, those who scored highly on the test were selected as the main participants of the study. In the second stage, an open-ended questionnaire in the form of a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) comprising of 30 authentic complaint situations was administered among the three groups. It should be noted that the DCTs were translated into Persian for the third group of participants. The data was analyzed using a nonparametric statistical hypothesis test called Kruskal-Wallis Test for assessing whether or not one of the three samples of independent observation tends to have larger values than the other and Mann-Whitney U Test to investigate which strategies in which groups are distinct and the findings revealed that all respondents showed significantly different behaviors to express complaints in the different situations. Moreover, sex and social power were found to cause differential use of complaint utterances.
Realization of Complaint Strategies by English and Persian Native Speakers by Soudabeh Tabatabaei
The present study aims to investigate the pragmatic norms in complaint speech act by English and Persian native speakers. To this end, data were collected through an open-ended questionnaire in the form of discourse completion task (DCT) from 30 English and 30 Persian native speakers. The collected data were analyzed according to Murphy and Neu's (1996) modified taxonomy of complaint strategies. The results indicated that Persian native speakers tended to express their complaint explicitly by the use of criticism strategy, whereas English native speakers tended to express their dissatisfaction implicitly by the use of compliant strategy. Therefore, the awareness of the cultural differences between these two speech communities will help to avoid intercultural miscommunication. The findings of this study also showed that social status of interlocutor have an influence on the strategy choice of the speakers.
Speech Act of Complaining: Socio-Pragmatic study of Complaint by Moroccan EFL Learners
International Journal of Language and Literary Studies, 2020
Complaining as a speech act can occur in every conversation even unintentionally. The use of this speech act is culture specific. The expressions and strategies used to issue a complaint vary according to context, interlocutors and to other socio-cultural variables. The present study investigates the complaint strategies of Moroccan higher education institutions’ EFL students. Data for the current study are collected from 37 second and third year students learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) representing a population in Moroccan Higher Education embodied in Moulay Ismail University, Meknes and who have managed to answer a discourse completion test composed of five situational prompts. A quantitative design is used for the collection, the analysis and the interpretation of data. The data gathered are described and analyzed using descriptive statistics. The findings indicate that Moroccan EFL students use specific linguistic forms to make complaints regarding different social ...
COMPLAINT STRATEGIES BY NATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH AND INDONESIAN-ENGLISH BILINGUAL SPEAKERS
KOLITA 15 ATMA JAYA CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF INDONESIA, 2017
Speakers of different languages will use different strategies in realizing complaints. In making complaints in English, English native speakers may use different strategies from non-native speakers of English. This study attempted to reveal the similarities and differences in the English complaint strategies used by native speakers of English and Indonesian-English bilingual speakers. Twenty participants consisting of ten native English speakers and twenty Indonesian English bilingual speakers took part in the study. Data were elicited using Discourse Completion Test (DCT) questionnaire consisting of eight scenarios that reflect the social distance and social power between the speaker and the interlocutor. The data were then analyzed using Trosborg's (1995) complaint strategy parameters (hints, annoyance, ill-consequences, indirect, direct, modified, explicit-behavior and explicit-person). The findings indicated that there were no significant differences in the overall strategies used between the two groups. However, there were differences in the way the complaints were articulated. Some Indonesian-English bilingual speakers inserted politeness markers in their speech act of complaint realizations such as 'sorry' and 'thank you'.
The Speech Act of Complaint: A Contrastive Study of Iraqi and Chinese EFL learners of English
This research investigates the pragmatic ability of Iraqi and Chinese English language students to make complaints in English in different contexts. To evaluate the effects of different cultural dimensions on speech acts of complaint, discourse completion tests, which are used in linguistics and pragmatics to test language proficiency and measure the pragmatic ability of students, were administered to undergraduate students of English from College of Arts/University of Anbar, Iraq and College of Arts/Beijing Language and Culture University, China. The responses of students were then compared to responses obtained from native English speakers of British nationality on the same test. Results have shown that Iraqi EFL learners of English are rather far behind the linguistic and pragmatic competence in performing speech acts of complain while their Chinese counterparts are more indirect than both the Iraq EFL and native British speaker in performing speech act of complain. The results of this study are useful in amending pedagogic process of teaching English language use in countries, such as Iraq and China, where English is not widely used.