Investigating Iranian EFL learners’ apology speech act strategies and their L2 productions
Investigating Iranian EFL learners’ apology speech act strategies and their L2 productions

Summary/Abstract: The present paper is an attempt to explore the type of apology speech act strategies which Iranian EFL learners at different proficiency levels use in their L2 productions and to discover whether there are any significant differences between participants’ apology strategies with respect to their proficiency levels. It also is intended to compare the learners’ apology strategies they use for their L1 and L2 based on apology frameworks in Persian and English and to see whether they are similar or different. This study was conducted in Kermanshah, Iran. The participants were 70 (19 males and 51 females) Iranian students at Kermanshah Islamic Azad University. They were selected from among first and second year M.A students majoring in English teaching. The data gathered by a questionnaire, and the participants were placed int hree levels of proficiency through a quick placement test. To analyse the data, the frequencies and percentages of the answers, as well as the Kruskal-Wallis test were run. Analysing the results indicated that there was no significance difference in apology strategies used at three levels of proficiency, and L1apology speech act patterns used by EFL learners were not considerably different from their L2productions. The results also revealed that there was a positive correlation between EFL learners’ English proficiency and their L1 pragmatic transfer.

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