This paper reports on a study that was carried out to describe and compare the apology strategies utilized by Iranian EFL and Malaysian ESL learners in confronting identical apology situations. For this purpose, data were elicited from 15 Iranian and 15 Malaysian students through a Discourse completion tasks questionnaire. The participants were of the same language proficiency. Results of the study showed certain similarities and differences in terms of frequency and typology of strategies used by Iranian and Malaysian students. The findings of this study might be of pedagogical help and significance to teachers, students and those interested in pragmatics in general and apology speech act in particular.

According to the theory of multiple intelligences (MI) propounded by Gardner (1983Gardner ( , 1999aGardner ( , 1999b, each individual has a multitude of intelligences that are quite independent of each other and each individual has a unique cognitive profile. Having access to the MI profiles and learning strategies of learners could help the teachers in planning activities to connect both strategies and students' talents and provide students with the best possible instruction. Thus, this study attempts to find out the relationship between the MI profiles and language learning strategies used by Iranian EFL high school students. Two hundred and twenty-nine students (121 males, 108 females) participated in the study. The instruments used to elicit information for this study were McKenzie's (1999) MI inventory and the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) Questionnaire. The findings revealed that there is a low, positive correlation between the two variables of MI and learning strategies, r = 0.24. In addition, it was found that there is a low, positive correlation between MI and different strategy types. The highest correlation was seen between meta-cognitive strategies and MI, followed by compensation and cognitive strategies. Furthermore, the findings reveal that Iranian students mostly use meta-cognitive strategies followed by social strategies.

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Abstract-This paper examined how the homogeneous dyads--two EFL (i.e. Iranian) dyads and two ES L (i.e., Malaysian) dyads--consciously reflected on their language in the course of performing collaborative writing tasks. To this end, the dyads were asked to do fifteen writing tasks collaboratively. The pair talk was audiorecorded and transcribed for each dyad. It was revealed that EFL/ES L dyads had different orientations towards metatalk; EFL dyads tended to focus considerably more on meta-linguistic features of language than ES L dyads. The findings are discussed with a reference to the different status of the English language in the two contexts of Iran and Malaysia (i.e., EFL vs. ES L) as well as the effect of previous educational experiences of the learners. The findings of the study could be of pedagogical help and significance to educationists and practitioners.

This paper is part of a larger study which was concerned with the comparison and description of Iranian and Malaysian students' classroom behaviors in general and their collaborative tendencies in particular. In this paper the core findings of interviews with five teachers who had the experience of teaching both in the contexts of Iran and Malaysia are reported. They all shared the view that the collectivist orientation is tangibly stronger among Malaysian participants than among their Iranian counterparts. The findings are discussed with regard to the macro-cultural dichotomy of world cultures (collectivist/ individualist). The possible pedagogical implications of the study are touched upon as well.