Politeness strategies used by Iraqi EFL learners

This study aims to identify the strategies of politeness used to express request by Iraqi EFL undergraduate learners of English. In this paper, the effect of status on the use of politeness strategies adopted by undergraduate learners is examined. Twenty first-year (G1) and twenty fourth-year (G2) EFL undergraduate students in the college of Education, Babylon University are involved in this study.
The subjects are asked to participate in a three role-play situation which can be described as follows: 'You work in an office. You have invited your boss, workmate and subordinate to a dinner party at your house. She/he has accepted your invitation. How would you tell each of them to come unaccompanied by his / her spouse?' (Adopted from Scarcella 1979:277). The performance of the students is compared to the performance of native English speakers in Scarcella's (1979) work.
The results of the data analysis conducted in this work indicate that Iraqi undergraduate EFL learners tend to appeal basically to negative politeness strategies when they express requests. However, these results show that the hypothesis adopted in this work is partially verified since the learners prefer indirectness almost equally well with directness in performing requests. They keep the former for addressing superiors and reserve the latter for situations in which their partners are either equals or inferiors.