A cultural study of social disagreement strategies by Iranian EFL male and female learners

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.