Effects of Transfer in Compliment Responses of Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners

The present study investigated whether Iranian learners of English from the intermediate level, use target compliment response strategies in English or there is a pragmatic transfer from the learners’ first language in responding to compliments through a Discourse Completion Test (DCT). In order to compare the transfer effects, the researcher collected the data from both Iranian and English speakers by using convenient sampling and simple random sampling as well as Iranian intermediate EFL students who were chosen from an institute by simple random sampling. The findings showed all the groups reflected a similar pattern by showing a high preference for accepting and deflecting strategies. The positive transfer effect also was observed in the micro strategies under acceptance and deflecting as well as strategy combinations. Iranian native speakers tended to respond to compliments more with returns and bald acceptance whereas native English speakers with neutral elaboration. With these findings, EFL learners also tended to use deflecting and accepting more.

Keywords:

Compliment response strategies , Native speakers , Non-native speakers , Pragmatic transfer , and positive transfer