Investigating the Use of Politeness Strategies in the “Results and Discussions Section of Iranian PhD Dissertations and British PhD Dissertations” and Its Relationship with Students Cultural Intelligence

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Investigating the Use of Politeness Strategies in the “Results and Discussions Section of Iranian PhD Dissertations and British PhD Dissertations” and Its Relationship with Students Cultural Intelligence

ABSTRACT

It is well agreed that EFL learners in Iran have to continually communicate in English once they graduate and need to write up their dissertations in English, especially the students of TEFL. Accordingly, these students have to be equipped withcertain strategies if they tend to be more persuasive for convincing their addressees to exert the greatest effect on them and politeness strategies are claimed to be among those required strategies. The concept of politeness is linked to the notion of ”face” by Goffman (1967). Considering the target cultures in Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model, it is admitted that for being successful in any aspects, it is necessary for the individuals to be culturally intelligent. Although the major focus of applied linguistics has been shifted toward speech, written discourse has not received the necessary consideration. Considering politeness strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) and distributing the cultural intelligence Questionnaire by Ang et al. (2007), the present researcher analyzed the “Results and Discussion”sections of 10 dissertations by Iranian PhD TEFL students and 10 British PhD TEFL students. Our results proved that Iranian writers most frequently used negative politeness strategies, followed by positive politeness strategies. British writers, like Iranians, used negative politeness strategies more than the other strategies. Moreover, there was a significant difference between the frequency of politeness strategies used by Persian and British writers. Considering the cultural intelligence, Iranian writers had an average CQ but the British students had a higher CQ. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that higher CQ equals higher strategy use but the results proved that there was no significant correlation between the Iranian participants’ CQ and their strategy use. In the same vein, there was no significant correlation between the British participants’ CQ and their strategy use. At last, gender difference was taken into account revealing that there were varying results obtained showing significant differences between the male and female Iranian and British writers’ strategy use.

Keywords: Cultural Intelligence (CQ), Politeness strategies, Gender