Refusal Strategies of Iranian EFL Learners: the role of sex, age,education levels and politeness

Introduction: The current study aimed at finding if there is any significant difference between male and female participants in the type of refusal strategies they use across different age andeducation levels as well as politeness systems. Materials and method: 110 Persian native speakers, 48 male and42 female took a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) which included 8 scenarios in each of which the respondents were presented witha situation in which they had to respond to a stimulus by rejectingit. The answers given to each item were analyzed and coded by an expert in pragmatics based on the taxonomy employed by Beebe,Takahashi and Uliss-Weltz (1990). To investigate the