The Effect of Gender and Status on the Apology Strategies Used by American Native Speakers of English and Iraqi EFL University Students

By:
Ahmed Mohammed Ali Abdul-Ameer Abu Humeid

Apology is a compensatory action to an offense and is used to re-establish the broken relationship with the hearer.
As a matter of fact, apology varies from one language to another. Moreover, Iraqi EFL university students focus on grammar rather than vocabulary and do not focus on pragmatics and hence problems occur. Accordingly, teachers and EFL learners must discern the similarities and the differences between their native language and the target one because what is deemed right in one language may not be considered right in the other.

This study intends to compare the apology strategies used by American native speakers of English and Iraqi EFL university students. It is going to demonstrate these strategies in terms of gender and status. There are several questions the given paper is going to to answer: 1) What apology strategies are used by both Iraqi EFL university students and American native speakers of English?, 2) Are there differences between the males and the females of both subjects in apology?, 3) Are there differences between the American and Iraqi participants in their apology responses under the influence of status?, and 4) Do Iraqi EFL university students resort to interlingual transfer when they apologize in English? A discourse completion test has been designed and applied to twenty Iraqi EFL university students at the third year and eight Americans have taken part in this study.

The results show that: (1) Iraq EFL leaners tend to use short and stilted sentences, while the American use long and honest sentences, (2) Iraqi EFL male leaners use more strategies with people of higher level, while the American males use more strategies with people of lower position. Both Iraqi EFL Female learners and American females employ more strategies with people of higher rank, (3) On the contrary to the Americans, Iraqi females use more apology strategies than Iraqi males, (4) Iraqi EFL learner resort to interlingual transfer, and (5) unlike Americans, Iraqi EFL learners are liable most of the time to put IFID or intensified IFID at the beginning of their apology expressions.