Complaint Behaviors among Native Speakers of Canadian English, Iranian EFL Learners, and Native Speakers of Persian (Contrastive Pragmatic Study) (original) (raw)
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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.
Pragmatic analysis of complaints by Iranian speakers of English
2017
Complaint speech act 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 on him or her unfavorably. Therefore, complaints by its nature can engender social relationship breakdown. Despite this, a complainer can use politeness when he or she aims to maintain a good relationship with complainee or to mitigate the severity of his or her complaint and face threat. This study aims to investigate the complaint speech act and politeness strategies of Iranian learners in communication with other nationalities in the academic context of a university. The objectives of the study are to investigate what complaint strategies are used by Iranian learners, how their complaints are structured, and how politeness is displayed in their complaint when communicating in English with other nationalities. The sample was made up of 50 Iranian postgraduate learners, 25 male and 25 female, and the data was collected by...
Hey I Want To Complain: Cross-Cultural Comparison of Complaints in Persian and American English
Elixir Soc. Sci, 2015
What should we do when the customer service is poor or when we buy a faulty product but the store does not let us return it? We should resolve such problems through complaining effectively. Having a good command of grammatical rules and vocabulary of the language is necessary but it is not enough; the ability to produce language that is socially and culturally appropriate is a real asset in settling such problems. This study attempted to compare the pragmatic competence of Iranian EFL learners with that of native speakers of English language when they find it necessary to perform the speech act of complaint. Ten Iranian EFL students of Azad University in Lahijan served as the subjects of this study. The data were collected through comparing the complaint letters written by American native speakers with those by Iranian EFL learners. The responses were analyzed in terms of the main components of complaints. The findings indicated that American native speakers and Iranian EFL learners showed different pragmatic behaviors.
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.
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. ...
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.
This study aims to investigate the type of complaint strategies employed by Iranian EFL learners and English native speakers in complaint interactions in different social status (higher, lower, equal). Thirty Iranian EFL learners and 30 English native speakers participated in the study. Discourse completion task (DCT) as an open-ended questionnaire was administered to them to elicit the required data. Then, the gathered data were analyzed according to modified taxonomy of complaint proposed by Murphy and Neu (1996) involving complaint, justification, criticism, explanation of purpose and candidates' solution: Demand / Request. In addition, three other strategies were added to this taxonomy i.e. sarcasm, threat and apology. The results indicated that social status of interlocutor had a great influence on strategy choice by participants of two groups. There is a hope that this study can contribute to our understanding of complaint strategies and help language teachers make aware of the existing discrepancies between English native speakers and Iranian EFL learners in realization of complaint strategies.
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.