A Cross Cultural Study on Iranian EFL Students’ Pragmatic Transfer

Abstract

This study aimed to identify the complaint strategies used by the Persian- speaking EFL students, and find out if there was any evidence of pragmatic transfer in their complaint realizations. To this end, three groups participated in the study. Two of them were the control groups, which included 10 Australian native speakers of English (ANSs) for the English baseline data, 10 native speakers of Persian (PNSs) for the Persian baseline data. The third group of participants involved 40 Persian-speaking EFL teacher trainees. The data were collected by means of a Discourse Completion Task (DCT). The original version of the DCT was given to the ANSs and interlanguage group (IL), the translated version of it was given to the (PNSs). In order to identify the complaint strategies utilized by the IL group, the collected data were coded and categorized according to the complaint taxonomy proposed by (Prykarpatska, 2008). To find out whether there was any evidence of pragmatic transfer in the complaint behaviors of the IL group, their responses were compared to those of the baseline groups. The results of the study showed cross-cultural differences and similarities between the research groups in performing the speech act of complaint with regard to the choice and frequency of strategies. Besides this, degree of familiarity and the social status of interlocutor were also found to influence the complaint responses of the research groups. In addition, the interpretation of the results revealed possible signs of transfer from the first language to the second language regarding some specific situations presented in the DCT. Evidence on the development of interlanguage by Iranian graduate students was also detected. Iranian learners were found to need more education on the choice of strategies used, as they performed similar strategies used by the PNS rather than the ANS.