Compliment Response Strategies Utilized by Jordanian Students: A Socio-Pragmatic Study

Abstract

Complimenting is a common communicative act in daily interactions that occurs among people in their daily communication. Complimenting practices vary across societies due to social and contextual factors. This study examined compliment response strategies employed by Jordanian students in an academic setting). This study collected data from undergraduate students at Jerash University who study in the English departments. A mixed-methods approach, employing observation and interviews, was used. Chen and Yang (2010) theoretical framework was adopted to analyze the data. The results showed that Jordanian students used various types of compliment responses: acceptance, mitigation/deflection, rejection, non-response and request interpretations. They utilized different strategies for each type, such as thanking, downgrading, disagreement, and silence. This study recommends future research comparing these findings with compliment response strategies used by students in other cultural contexts.