FACE THREATENING ACT AMONG IRANIAN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL EFL LEARNERS WRITING PERFORMANCE ACROSS GENDER

The present study aimed to investigate face threatening acts found in iranian male and female junior high school efl learners' writing performance. To this end, 77 male and female high school efl students were chosen as the participants. In order to investigate ftas in the production of written requests; the participants in three groups were required to complete conversations. The responses of the students compared with brown and levin son's politeness strategies. This study enjoyed mixed methods approach. First, a reliable ket test was administered in order to homogenize the participants, and then the number of ftas was counted and classified into negative and positive ftas using brown and levinson's model. In the second phase, the features of politeness strategies appeared in the examined texts were analyzed by using johnson' (1992) model. Written texts were evaluated in terms of politeness strategies on five-point likert scale. The findings of this study revealed that male efl learners were more polite than female students. Furthermore, findings showed that the more the number of negative politeness strategies was used, the more the number of face-threatening acts was employed. Findings also revealed that an increase in the proficiency level of the learners would lead to the use of appropriate politeness strategies.