Follow-up Moves in Compliment IRF: A Comparison between Native and Non-native Speakers of English

Follow-up Moves in Compliment IRF: A Comparison between Native and Non-native Speakers of English

Complimenting is a sophisticated pattern of behavior. McCarthy (2000) states that in the English culture the compliment IRF most often ends with the Response move and does not continue to include the Follow-up move unless the speakers suppose "a great service has been done"(p. 16). Thus, the present study set out to examine the complimenting IRF among native speakers of English and Iranian EFL learners. The non-native participants consisted of 28 EFL graduate students, 16 males and 12 females, aged from 23 to 30, who responded to CRs in a DCT. The EFL learnersʹ sample of responses was compared with a corpus of 250 cases of English native speakersʹ responses to CRs collected from various English movies. The findings suggested that: a) whereas smile or silence (non-verbal responses) constituted 94% of the native speakersʹ follow-ups, the EFL learners responded verbally in this move and nonverbal responses constituted only 9% of the total responses; b) the compliment IRF is realized differently in the two cultures; and c) the size of the service upon which the act of complimenting was done had no effect on the type of the Follow-up move (verbal vs. nonverbal) among Iranian EFL learners, and d) the NNSs clearly relied on certain formulaic sequences to perform the follow-ups. Results revealed that when interacting, Iranian EFL learners wish the interaction to last rather than end, a finding which can have a marked positive effect on the acquisition of the target language. Implications and suggestions for further research are discussed.