Complaint Behaviors among Native Speakers of Canadian English, Iranian EFL Learners, and Native Speakers of Persian (Contrastive Pragmatic Study)

Abstract

The purpose of the present article is to make a contrastive cross-cultural pragmatic analysis between Canadian native speakers, Iranian EFL learners, and Iranian native speakers of Persian in regard to the speech act of complaint. To do so, in the first stage, a Nelson Proficiency Test was administered among 20 Canadian university students majoring in different fields,20 among Iranian EFL learners, and 20 among Persian speakers, respectively. Based on the results of this test, those who scored highly on the test were selected as the main participants of the study. In the second stage, an open-ended questionnaire in the form of a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) comprising of 30 authentic complaint situations was administered among the three groups. It should be noted that the DCTs were translated into Persian for the third group of participants. The data was analyzed using a non-parametric statistical hypothesis test called Kruskal-Wallis Test for assessing whether or not one of the three samples of independent observation tends to have larger values than the other and Mann-Whitney U Test to investigate which strategies in which groups are distinct and the findings revealed that all respondents showed significantly different behaviors to express complaints in the different situations. Moreover, sex and social power were found to cause differential use of complaint utterances.