THE EFFECTS OF PROFICIENCY AND GENDER ON THE COMPLIMENTS AND COMPLIMENT RESPONSES MADE BY IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS

This study reports on the effects that gender and proficiency have on three aspects of compliments made by students majoring in English in Iranian English as Foreign Language (EFL) contexts at university level. The aspects studied in this paper included, a) topics of compliments, b) syntactic structures used to launch compliments and, c) the type of responses given to compliments. Sixteen EFL learners, aged 20 to 23, were selected out of 57 based on the results obtained from the speaking and listening sections of the IELTS exam administrated by the researcher with intra-rater reliability of 0.76; subsequently, the participants were assigned to two groups of intermediate and advanced levels. In each group there were four male and four female students. Individuals from the same gender were paired to each other, male with male and female with female. They were asked to talk about six topics presented by the researcher out of which three were of significance to this study. Students were instructed to record themselves while speaking. The data collected from the recording showed that three types of syntactic structures prevailed. The examination of the data also showed that the compliments were mostly on appearance, achievements and personal traits with appearance being the most frequent. The compliment responses were the last aspect that was studied, and appreciation was the most frequent response type for both male and female students and for both intermediate and advanced proficiency levels. The results showed that proficiency and gender had an effect on the compliments and their responses. The findings also substantiates the point made by Celce-Murcia and Olshtain (2005) that acquisition of pragmatic aspects of language could take several years although sometimes learners never acquire a native-like pragmatic aspect of foreign language.