[01] Sayed Reza Nasiri, Ministry of Education, Region Five of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran. [02] Ali Forutan, English Department, Farhangian University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran.

The purpose of the present study is to find out to what extent Iranian EFL teachers in private institutes and senior high schools are capable of performing strategies of apology as one specific speech act and to evaluate this speech act in the course books they were teaching. To this end, sixty male and female language teachers teaching English as a foreign language took part in this study. A Discourse Completion Test (DCT) was distributed among the participants and their teaching materials were evaluated as well. The performance of two groups of high schools and institutes teachers was compared. The analysis of the results indicated significant differences between the apology strategies used by the public school and institute teachers. Correspondingly, there was a significant difference between the course books used by the groups in terms of apology strategies used in different social contexts. The results of this study might be of educational contribution and implication to teachers, learners and those interested in pragmatics in general and apology speech act in particular.

Communicative Competence, Discourse Completion Test, Apology Strategies, Dominance

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