Description:
As a cross-cultural study investigating expressions of greeting in Iran, this study investigates politeness strategies that native Persian, English and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners employ for greetings in opposite gender contexts. Considering gender as a variable, Persian EFL learners' politeness and formality vary according to the situational context. How formality increases in different gender greetings in Persian is a cultural specific phenomenon. Forty-six (female and male) EFL learners divided into two groups participated in the present study. The first group included 30 undergraduate EFL learners in Isfahan University with an age range of 21-24. The second group of participants included 16 university students- 8 Persian EFL learners in Isfahan University and 8 Native American English students studying Medical Laboratory Technology at Dalton State College in Dalton, Georgia, USA. Findings of data including responses from an open-ended Discourse Completion Task (DCT) and a Dramatic Written Discourse Completion Task (DWDC) show that gender has a significant effect on the degree of formality in Persian greetings. This study presents that EFL learners transfer Persian style of greeting in different situations to their EFL performance. The results of the Chi-square test also suggest that EFL learners use inappropriate politeness expressions in their English responses. Since the social norms of politeness are believed to be universal by EFL learners, L1 pragmatic norms are clearly observed in EFL performances.