Making suggestions: A perspective of perspectives

Abstract

The purpose of this cross-sectional quantitative study is to explore suggestion strategies as employed by gender in the Iraqi EFL context. It is a pragmatic descriptive approach where the speech act of suggestion is dealt with from the aspect of perspective based on a model developed by Li (2010). The study covers 26 males and 47 females who are asked to complete an open-ended WDCT encompassing 12 suggestion-required situations. The gleaned data are descriptively quantified and then statistically analyzed utilizing SPSS version 22 in addition to MS Excel 2016. Findings revealed a gender discrepancy at types of suggestions in which females are found to make more suggestions with hearer dominance and implicit dominance than males, whereas both genders make an almost equal amount of suggestions with speaker dominance, speaker-hearer dominance, and other dominance. Regardless of gender, it is revealed that Iraqi EFL learners tend to produce suggestions with speaker dominance more than other types of suggestions.