Ebrahimi, Fatemeh

An Investigation into Advice Giving and Receiving by Iranian EFL Students and Teachers

There have been always an interaction between culture and pragmatics. Thus, conducting studies which investigate pragmatics in the contexts in which it is used and practiced is necessary. The purpose of the current study was to examine the advice giving and receiving strategies used by Iranian EFL students and their teachers. To this end, two questionnaires were designed by the researcher. Both of the questionnaires were DCT questionnaires containing real-life situations for eliciting data from participants. To expand the number of participants and to avoid possible ambiguities, students' DCT questionnaire was multiple choice. On the other hand, teachers' questionnaire was an open-ended DCT questionnaire. All in all 200 students and 15 teachers participated in the study. The data gathered by means of these questionnaires made the researcher able to answer three research issues:1) Teachers' advice giving strategies, 2) Students' advice giving strategies, and 3) Students' advice receiving strategies. The main variable in the current study was social and institutional status. Based on this variable, the situations in the DCT questionnaire were categorized into two groups of equal and unequal. Equal situations happened between the peer or the people with equal social status (e.g. classmates). On the other hand unequal situations referred to situations which happened between people with unequal social status (e.g. students and teachers). It was found that Iranian EFL teachers are conservative about offering advice and in both equal and unequal situations preferred gradual advice. It was demonstrated that the popular advice giving strategy among students is direct advice. Moreover, it was found that Iranian EFL students prefer complex advice acceptance more than any other method of reception. Social status was proved to be an influential factor in determining teachers' and students' strategies. In addition, it was found that undergraduate students were more concerned about the difference between equal and unequal situations. On the other hand, M.A. and PhD students' responses were more independent of this variable. The study had implications for both teachers and students, and also the cultural administrators who can enhance the acceptability of advice in the society. Keywords: Advice mitigation, Advice strategies, DCT, Interlanguage pragmatics, Pragmatics