investigating expressions of apology used by iraqi efl students based on cohen and olshtain’s framework

The present exploratory conversation analysis examined the types of apology strategies commonly used by advanced iraqi efl learners. it also explored how gender, relative power, and social distance affected the apology strategies adopted by advanced iraqi efl learners. to this end, 90 male/female advanced-level adult iraqi efl learners from b.a. were conveniently selected. to conduct the study oxford placement test, a written discourse completion test (wdct) questionnaire, as well as cross-cultural speech act realization patterns (ccsarp) was used. the participants completed the 24 scenarios in 36 minutes. then, the frequency of each strategy was calculated across the three sets. to answer the first research question, the overall frequency of the apology strategies was calculated and reported. to answer the second research question, the predictive effect of gender, relative power, and social distance which influenced the apology strategies adopted by advanced iraqi efl learners regression analysis was run on spss (26.00). the findings revealed that the most frequent apology strategies by iraqi efl learners include resp, expl, repr, ifid, and forb. the results also indicated that iraqi efl female learners utilized more apology strategies compared to male learners. it was also found that the frequencies of apology strategies were different in lower status (+power), equal status (=power), and higher status (-power). in addition, the representation of apology strategies was different in –distance and +distance situations among iraqi efl learners.