Strategies of Making Suggestions by Jordanian and American Undergraduate University Students

The purpose of this contrastive pragmatic study is to investigate the similarities and differences between the strategies used by Jordanian and American undergraduate university students when making and responding to suggestions. Furthermore, this study aims at investigating the most frequent suggestion strategies used by Jordanian and American undergraduate university students for making and responding to suggestions. To this end, sixty undergraduate university students, thirty undergraduate Jordanian university students of various majors studying at Philadelphia University, and thirty undergraduate American university students of various majors studying at The State University of New York were asked to complete a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) consisting of sixteen situations in which their suggestion act was explored. The research data were analyzed descriptively using frequencies and percentages.