Mitigating Advice: A Study of Iranian L2 Learners of English and Australian English Speakers

1. Mitigating Advice: A Study of Iranian L2 Learners of English and Australian English Speakers Mahshad Davoodifard School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics English as an International Language February 2010

2. Introduction • What is advice? • “Any activity that involves one party conveying to another what the former believes to be beneficial to the latter regarding some performance or behavior” (Waring 2007, p.367) • Why study advice? • prevalent in everyday conversational interactions • Less well documented in the speech act literature • governed by several social, situational and personal factors reflective of culture-specific norms and values • No existing pragmatic study of advice in Persian as a native language • No existing investigation of advice in Persian-English interlanguage pragmatics

3. Focus of the study • Unsolicited advice offered by Iranian Persian-speaking learners of English and Australian English speakers • External modification strategies • mitigating supportive move strategies • Grounder • Preparator • Imposition minimizer • Disarmer • Internal modification strategies • Syntactic downgraders • Lexical/phrasal downgraders • Appealer • Hedge • Politeness marker • Subjectivizer • Understater

4. Supportive move strategies • Grounder: giving reasons, explanations and justifications • Preparator: preparing the hearer for the advice • Disarmer: removing any potential objection the hearer might raise • Imposition minimizer: reducing the imposition placed on the hearer by the advice offered

5. downgraders • Syntactic: conditional, interrogative, negation etc. • Appealer: devices used by the speaker to appeal to the hearer’s benevolent understanding (Blum Kulka et al., 1989) • Hedge: devices used to indicate tentativeness, possibility and lack of precision • Politeness marker • Subjectivizer: “elements in which the speaker explicitly expresses his or her subjective opinion vis-à-vis the state of affairs referred to in the proposition (Blum Kulka et al., 1989). • Understater: adverbial modifiers used to under-represent the state of affairs referred to in the proposition

6. Method • Participants • Data collection instruments • English and Persian Discourse Completion Tests (DCT) • 14 scenarios • Different topics and settings • Varying in age, gender, social distance

7. Resultsfrequency of advice • Number of advice offered per person • Similar number of advice in Iranian English/Persian DCT data • Postgraduate participants offered advice more frequently • Iranian participants offered advice more frequently than Australian respondents

8. Supportive move strategies: frequency analysis • Most frequently used by Iranian undergraduate participants who used them also more frequently than Iranian postgraduate respondents as well as Australian participants at both levels

9. Supportive move strategies: Percentage distribution • The Iranian participants used higher levels of grounder • They also used higher levels of imposition minimizer with their Persian advice • The Australian participants used higher percentages of preparator

10. Grounder: downgrading or upgrading? • People don’t live just to study. They study as part of their life. Call it a day. Go and get some sleep. (PG26, Postgraduate; EPDCT) • A good mentality affects a person’s appearance a lot. Try to be happy and at the same time work on your appearance as well. (PG22, Postgraduate; PDCT) • You look exhausted, can you afford a night off to relax; it’ll probably help your productivity. (A09, Postgraduate; EDCT)

11. Downgraders: frequency analysis • Use of downgraders per person: • Australian participants used downgraders most frequently • Iranian participants used downgraders similarly in their L1 and L2 • Iranian postgraduate participants used downgraders slightly more frequently than the undergraduate respondents

12. Downgraders: percentage distribution

13. Hedges constitute more than 40% of downgraders used by Australian participants: • Maybe you shouldn’t drink out of the hose. The sign there says it’s not very sanitary. It could make you really sick. (A06, Australian; EDCT) • Maybe we should go over to the place over there and get some salads. That might be better for us than the junk food. (A14, Australian; EDCT) • Subjectivizers were used similarly across all groups: • Really? I reckon you should put it off for a few months. The weather up there is way better in the September holidays. (A06, Australian; EDCT) • I believe morality is [more] important than appearance and you can attract people by your behavior. (56, Year level 4, EPDCT) • Iranian participants used higher levels of syntactic downgraders: • Mary, I’ve seen you trying to lose weight. Why don’t you try a diet? I think that’s the best way to lose some weight. (34Q, Year level 3, EPDCT)

14. summary • The Iranian participants gave advice more frequently than the Australian students • The Iranian participants of higher age and L2 proficiency level gave advice more frequently • The Australian participants used downgraders significantly more frequently than the Iranian respondents • The Iranians used grounder strategy more frequently to give reasons for their advice

15. Conclusion • Variations in advice giving can reveal deep sociocultural values of speakers from different linguistic backgrounds • Iranian Persian speakers seem to have high respect and a strong sense of obligation towards advice giving • They can show friendliness and kheir khaahi (wanting the good for others) through advice giving • Frequent use of grounder and lack of downgrading strategies can maximize the chance of the advice being accepted by the hearer • The Australian participants do not give advice frequently. For them, advice might be regarded as interference in other people’s affairs and threatening to their privacy • Analysis of culture-specific norms and values dominating the use of language can contribute to minimizing cultural clashes and misunderstandings in intercultural/cross-cultural communication