摘要：In an compliment response behavior suggested the need for instruction in these socio-pragmaticfunctions that are instrumental in personal and professional success in non-native andbilingual speakers of English. increasingly culturally diverse environment at urban universities, native and non-nativespeakers of English are continually negotiating politeness behaviors. Still in the 21st century,it is not only culture but also gender that determines norms of politeness. The linguisticchallenge of breaking these codes of politeness can be particularly daunting to Englishlanguage learners and to language educators whose task is to devise pedagogical methods thatwill foster the development of sociolinguistic and pragmatic competencies in the non-nativespeaker. This study examined compliment and compliment response behaviors of 27 ESLand bilingual students at a large urban university. For some non-native speakers, the lack ofL2 proficiency may have inhibited compliment responses, suggesting the need for explicitinstruction and practice in the L2. Aside from the sociopragmatic failure attributed to lack ofL2 proficiency, this small sample of compliment response behaviors produced what appearedto be gender-related patterning. While males and females both equally questionedcompliments, a pattern of comment acceptance and no acknowledgement was found to beemployed by males twice as often as by females although this may be attributed to thepossibility that men may have spoken more because there were a greater number of male thanfemale participants. Although females accepted compliments in the female-male dyads, nofemale-female dyads yielded compliment sequences, suggesting that females do not alwaysfollow the expected compliment response behavior. The results of this very limited study of.
