A Comparative study of Sympathy and Condolences Use by Persian EFL Learners in Comparison to English

One’s sympathies are the formal expression of pity or sorrow for someone else’s misfortune. In Second Language Acquisition research area, speech acts studies are often conducted to measure SL learners’ pragmatic (in) competence. Unlike other speech acts, the speech act of giving condolences and sympathy has not yet been the subject of cross-linguistic or cross-cultural studies across Persian and other languages. This initiative study attempts to investigate a comparative analysis of giving condolences across English and Persian. Henceforth, an English 15-item Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was given to 10 native speakers of English and to 50 Iranian EFL learners who were also given the Persian version of the DCT for the purpose of comparison. The results of a prior pilot study will indicate whether there is a significant difference between the two groups or not.