A Comparative Study of Perception of (Im)Politeness between Iranian EFL Learners and Americans: The Case of Request Speech Act
A Comparative Study of Perception of (Im)Politeness between Iranian EFL Learners and Americans: The Case of Request Speech Act

Summary/Abstract: Learning a language means learning the culture. What we act and speak reflect the culture of our language. Requests have attracted the attention of many researchers which they have often been investigated adjacent to the politeness (Liu, 2007; Jalilifar, 2009; Al-Marrani & Sazalie, 2010; Félix- Brasdefer, 2010; Youssef, 2012; Mohammadi & Tamimi Sa’d, 2014). The purpose of this study is to examine Iranian EFL learners, Persian native speakers, and American English native speakers’ perception of speech act of requests without politeness markers. To this end, the data were collected from 35 EFL learners, 35 Persian native speakers, and 14 English native speakers. The data were collected through an open ended questionnaire in the form of Discourse Completion Task and a Perception questionnaire in the form of Likert scale adopted from Saidi and Khosravi (2015). The questionnaire consists of situations with variations in contextual variables, i.e. social status: requests made by people of higher social status, equal social status and lower social status relative to the speakers. The participants were asked to imagine themselves in the situations and rate the (im)politeness of each request situation on a 4-point Likert scale. Moreover, they were required to write down what they would say if they were in a situation without politeness markers. A translated version of questionnaire was handed to Persian native speakers. Results indicated that there was a significant difference between EFL learners and English native participants, and also between EFL learners and Persian speakers’ perceptions of (im)politeness of different request situations. Moreover, by comparing the three groups of participants who perceived a request as mostly/ slightly impolite, the writer provided information about their expectations of politeness in different situations. It is hoped that the findings of this study can add to the body of knowledge in speech act studies in general and to our understanding of Iranian EFL learners and Persian native speakers’ perception of (im)politeness in particular.

• Details
• Contents