efl students gender and socioeconomic status: the use of politeness strategies in the first and second languages

within the components of communicative competence, a special emphasis is put on the “rules of politeness,” specifically the politeness strategies (brown and levinson, 1978) that speakers deploy when performing the request speech act. this is because the degree of imposition that making a request places upon one’s interlocutor(s) has been seen to be influenced by several factors among which, as coats (1993) asserts, gender and socioeconomic status are two important ones. the present study was an attempt to show whether there is a relationship between the students’ gender and socioeconomic status on one hand, and their choice of politeness strategies in their speech on the other, specifically in the request speech act in their first and second languages. also, it was a contrastive study which aimed to determine whether there is a transfer of politeness strategies from the first language to the second language. the participants included 100 iranian university students studying english at the advanced level of english language proficiency. based on their answers to the self-assessment socio-economic status questionnaire and their gender, they were divided into the following four groups: group 1: male-high; group 2: male-low; group 3: female-high; and group 4: female-low. there were 25 students in each group. the instruments used to gather the data were the english version and the persian version of a discourse completion test. the findings revealed that there was a significant relationship between the two variables of gender and politeness strategy use for request speech act in both l1 and l2. the findings also demonstrated that no significant relationship existed between the variables of socioeconomic status and politeness strategy use neither in l1 nor in l2. finally, the findings showed a significant relationship between the variables of gender and transfer of politeness strategies and no significant relationship between the variables of socio-economic status and transfer of politeness strategies in request speech act.