COMPARISON OF THE PERSIAN NATIVE SPEAKERS AND PERSIAN EFL LEARNERS’ USE OF COMPLIMENT RESPONSE STRATEGIES IN THEIR L1

Abstract

The present study aimed to compare the use of Persian native speakers and Persian EFL learners’ use of compliment response strategies in their L1. For this purpose, a convenient sample of 120 participants was deployed, which included 60 Persian native speakers. Also 60 intermediate EFL learners from a private language institute in Isfahan. The participants were all female; they shared Persian as their mother tongue and their ages ranged between 18 to 35 years old. To ensure the homogeneity of the EFL learners’ group, a quick Oxford placement test was administered. The data of this study were collected through oral discourse completion tasks, which elicited the speech act of compliment response in four different situations. Persian native speakers and Persian EFL learners responded to the tasks in Persian. The results of chi-square analysis on Persian native speakers’ Compliment Responses and Persian EFL learners’ Compliment Responses in their L1 demonstrated a significant difference. Although the agreement was the most common response type in both corpora, Persian EFL learners used a wider range of subcategories of the agreement Compliment Response compared to Persian native speakers. Furthermore, Persian EFL learners used non-agreement Compliment Responses much less than the Persian native speakers. The analysis indicated that Persian EFL learners tended to use more English-like acceptance strategies even when they responded to compliments in their mother tongue. This research has evidence for the occurrence of backward pragmatic transfer from L2 to L1 for CRs.