Politeness strategies in remindings: A cross-cultural study of Iranian EFL learners and Americans

Abstract

This cross-cultural study examines the speech act of reminding by Iranian English learners and American English native speakers. The primary objective is to study how Iranian EFL learners perform much understudied speech act of reminding in English. To this end, the participants are selected from Iranian learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and American English native speakers through an open-ended questionnaire in the form of a Discourse Completion Task (DCT).The collected data are then analyzed based on a framework adopted from Peterson’s (2012) study of speech act of reminding. The findings show that whereas English native speakers utilize more indirect strategies in reminding their interlocutors to cope with the required activity, EFL learners tend to use direct strategies more frequently.