The Study of Disagreement Strategies to Suggestions Used by Iranian Male and Female Learners

Abstract

This study seeks to investigate the ways in which the speech act of disagreement 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 on the role that gender and power might play in the employment of strategies to mitigate the threat of disagreement. Students were asked to complete a discourse completion test (DCT) designed by the researcher. They were supposed to read nine suggestions 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 and used different strategies from those of males.