A Cultural Study of Social Disagreement Strategies by Iranian EFL Male and Female Learners

Salehipour Bavarsad, Samira; Simin, Shahla

doi:10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.48.78

ILSHS > Volume 48 > A Cultural Study of Social Disagreement Strategies...

< Back to Volume

A Cultural Study of Social Disagreement Strategies by Iranian EFL Male and Female Learners

Full Text PDF

Abstract:

The speech act of disagreement is one of the neglected areas of research in the Iranian context. This study seeks to investigate the ways in which this act is expressed by young male and female Persian speakers. To collect the data 100 participants (50 males, 50 females,) were selected randomly from among undergraduate and graduate students of University of Isfahan and Islamic Azad University (Najafabad branch). The focus of this study was the role that gender and power might play in the employment of strategies to mitigate the threat of the act of disagreement. Students were asked to complete a discourse completion test (DCT) designed by the researcher. They were supposed to read nine situations, and react to them via making disagreements. Respondents were expected to disagree with three interlocutors with higher status, three peers and three with lower status. In order to analyze the utterances of disagreement, Muntigl and Turnbull’s taxonomy (1998) was employed. The results revealed that although both males and females were concerned about the power status of interlocutors and try to apply the appropriate strategies while expressing their disagreements, females were more cautious.

Info:

Periodical:

International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences (Volume 48)

Pages:

78-90

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.48.78

Citation:

S. Salehipour Bavarsad and S. Simin, "A Cultural Study of Social Disagreement Strategies by Iranian EFL Male and Female Learners", International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, Vol. 48, pp. 78-90, 2015

Online since:

February 2015

Authors:

Samira Salehipour Bavarsad, Shahla Simin

Keywords:

Disagreement, Gender, Power, Speech Act

Export:

RIS, BibTeX, Text

Distribution:

Open Access

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

References:

Al-Tayib Umar, A. M. (2006). The speech act of complaint as realized by advanced Sudanese learners of English. Umm Al-Qura University. Journal of Educational & Social Sciences & Humanities, 18(2), Jumada II 1427AH.

Bargiela-Chiappini, F. (2003).

Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1978). Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena In EN Goody (Ed. ), Questions and politeness: Strategies in social interaction, Cambridge (pp.56-311). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and Power. London: Longman.

Gruber, H. (1998). Disagreeing sequential placement and internal structure of disagreements in conflict episodes. Text, 18, 467-503.

Guodong, L., & Jing, H. (2005). A contrastive study on disagreement strategies for politeness between American English & Mandarin Chinese. Asian EFL Journal, 10 (1).

Hatch, E. (1992). Discourse and language education. Cambridge Language Teaching Library: Cambridge University press.

Honda, A. (2002). Conflict management in Japanese public affairs talk shows. Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 573-608.

Jalilifar, A. (2009). Request strategies: cross-sectional study of Iranian EFL learners and Australian native speakers. English Language Teaching Journal, 2(1), 790-803.

Ji, S. J. (2000). Face, and polite verbal behaviors in Chinese culture. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 1059-1062.

http: /dx. doi. org/10. 1016/S0378-2166(99)00068-5 Kakava, Ch. (2002). Opposition in modern Greek discourse: Cultural and Contextual constraints. Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 1537-1568.

Kihekaya, F. (2010). The pragmatic knowledge of Turkish EFL students in using certain request strategies, 9(1), 185-201.

Liu, S. (2004).

Moon, K. (2001). Speech act study: differences between native and nonnative speakers' complaint strategies.

The American University. Retrieved from www. Science-direct-journal. com.

Muntigl, P., & Turnbull, W. (1998). Conversational structure and facework in arguing. Journal of Pragmatics, 29, 225-256. http: /dx. doi. org/10. 1016/S0378-2166(97)00048-9.

Nelson, G., Al-Batal, M., & El-Bakary, W. (2002). Directness vs. indirectness: Egyptian Arabic and US English communication style. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 26, 39-57.

Pearson, E. (1986). Agreement/disagreement: An example of results of discourse analysis applied to the oral English classroom. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 74(1), 47-61.

Rees-Miller, J. (2000). Power, severity, and context in disagreement. Journal of Pragmatics, 32(8), 1087-1111.

Richard J. C., & Schimidt R. (1985). Dictionary of language teaching & applied linguistics. Longman: Pearson Education.

Schmitt, N. (2002). An introduction to applied linguistics. New York: Oxford university press.

Scott, S. (2002). Linguistic feature variations within disagreements: An empirical investigation. Text, 22(2), 301-328.

Takano, S. (2005).

Tannen, D., & Kakava, Ch. (1992). Power and solidarity in modern Greek conversation: Disagreeing to disagree. Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 10, 11-34.

Walko, Z. (2007). EFL research articles through the lens of pragmatic politeness. Retrieved from http: /langped. elte. hu/Walko. pdf Watts, Richard J. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Yu, M. (2003). On universality of face: Evidence from Chinese compliment response behavior. Journal of Pragmatics, 35, 1679-1710. http: /dx. doi. org/10. 1016/S03782166(03)00074-2.

Yule, G. (1996).

Show More Hide

Cited By:

This article has no citations.