Apology Strategies of Iranian ESL Students

The main focus of this study, which is of the most important and most frequent speech acts used in multicultural settings, is the speech act of apology. It probes native Persian-speaking ESL university students’ apology and nonapology strategies based on Cohen and Olshtain’s (1981) frame work to evince variations ascribed to gender, mother tongue, and culture. The results of this survey reveal that Iranian male and female respondents use different percentages of apology and non-apology strategies. Considering significance levels, in general, except for a few strategies, there is no statistically significant difference between the groups considering the number and type of strategies used.