analyzing politeness strategies in iranian efl learners’ emails: a gender perspective

in this paper we discuss and analyze the politeness strategies in iranian efl learners’ emails to teachers from a gender perspective. the research is done based on brown and levinson’s politeness theory (1987). we specifically examine the variation in politeness strategies used by iranian male and female english learners when communicating about their homework, problems, requests or language related subjects with their teachers. the data for this study represents a subset of 40 emails texts, 20 of which belong to males and 20 to female participants. a quantitative method is applied in order to find out the most frequently used politeness strategies through bar charts, pie charts and spss statistical formulas. results clarified that there is statistically evidence of a difference between male and female politeness strategies in emails texts.