Abstract:
The purpose of the present study is to compare the impoliteness strategies employed by Iranian and English students in English and Persian Languages. The participants consisted of 6o Iranian EFL learners at intermediate level of language proficiency, 60 Iranian non-English major students, and 212 native English-speaking students. The data were collected through an open-ended questionnaire in the form of discourse completion task where responses to different threatening situations were elicited. The questionnaire consisted of six situations with variations in social power. The data were analyzed based on Limberg’s (2009) model of threat responses. The findings showed variations in the use of strategies employed with variation of social power in different situations. Moreover, the overall findings displayed the frequent use of tendency strategies, that is, toward compliance, toward non-compliance, by the three groups of respondents. It is hoped that the findings of this study can add to the body of knowledge in impoliteness studies and to our understanding of how threat responses vary cross-culturally in particular.
Machine summary:
For example, researchers have investigated impoliteness in military discourse (Culpeper, 1996), media (Jan & How, 2015), political discourse (Khurniawan, Wijayanto & Hikmat, 2017), internet discussion forums (Shum & Lee, 2013), legal discourse (Archer, 2011), speech acts (Félix-Brasdefer, 2006), literary works (Culpeper, 1998; Rudanko, 2006), second or foreign language context (Mugford, 2007), and interaction in academic contexts (Santamaría-García, 2017).
Moreover, some studies have investigated linguistic impoliteness in various languages like Spanish (Marco, 2008), German (House, 2010), Japanese (Nishimura, 2010), Polish (Górska, 2014), English (Limberg, 2009), and Persian (Ghasempour & Farnia, 2016; Jannejad, Bordbar, Bardideh, & Banari, 2015; Mahmoodi & Salimiyan, 2016; Rahmani, Modarresi, Ghiasian, & Zandi, 2016, to name a few).
As a culture- specific concept, impoliteness and threat responses are examined among three groups of respondents: Iranian EFL learners at intermediate level of language proficiency, Iranian non-English major students, and native English-speaking students.
Thus, the primary objective is addressing the following issue: What strategies Iranian EFL learners, non-English major students, and native English-speaking students use in situations of threat responses with variations of social status.
Table 7 Overall Distribution of Strategies in Situations 2 & 5 (Equal Social Status) (View the image of this page) Note: C: Compliance, TC: Toward Compliance, OE: Open Ended, TNC: Toward Non- Compliance, NC: Non Compliance However, results of chi-square showed that native English-speaking students and EFL learners used TC significantly more than Iranian non- English major students (sig.