An Investigation of the Role of Power and Gender in Iranian EFL Learners’ Use of Politeness Strategies in Disagreement

The speech act of disagreement has received scant attention in the field of pragmatics in Iranian EFL contexts. The present study was an attempt to investigate the ways in which power relations and gender have an influence on carrying out the speech act of disagreement by Iranian EFL learners. To determine whether and to what extent uttering the speech act of disagreement and the appropriate politeness strategies employed by Iranian EFL learners in so doing differ with respect to the learners’ gender and the power status of their interlocutors, a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) was completed by ۳۰ (۱۵ male, ۱۵ female) participants majoring in B.A. and M.A. programs of English Literature and English Language Teaching (ELT) in University of Tabriz. The DCT consisted of six scenarios in which the participants were required to disagree with two interlocutors of higher status, two with equal status, and two with lower status. In order to count and analyze the disagreement-carrying utterances provided by the participants, the taxonomy from Muntigl and Turnbull (۱۹۹۵) was employed. The findings point to evidence on the existence of a relation between the learners’ gender and the interlocutors’ power status in uttering the speech act of disagreement. It is hoped that the findings may provide useful information for instructors who are tasked with designing and developing new materials for EFL learners.

Keywords:

Pragmatics , Power , Gender , Politeness , Speech act , Disagreement