The effect of bilingualism on compliment response patterns of Iranian English and non-English speaking teachers

Iran, ID CLEaR2015-256;  This study investigates the effect of bilingualism on compliment response patterns of Iranian English and non-English speaking teachers. To this end, more than 300 participants were chosen and given a discourse completion task which comprised four situations. These situations were compliments on different things such as appearance, clothes, etc. The participants were asked to write a word, phrase or a sentence in response to the compliments. The participants were divided into two groups of male and female and Persian and Turkish speakers in order to investigate the effect of bilingualism on compliment response patterns of participants. Participants were further divided into bilinguals and monolinguals. The purpose of the study was to find out whether teachers who know and who do not know English behave differently regarding compliment response patterns. The findings revealed that the bilingual group that is those who could speak English accepted the compliments most of the time. This result was attributed to the exposure of these teachers to English culture which is primarily characterized by the acceptance of compliments  

Key words: Compliment response, compliment, Persian, Turkish, distance