Who Is Responsible for Successful Communication?

This article attempts to compare aspects of discourse and sociolinguistic competence among speakers of American English (AE) and Tunisian learners of English with regard to the communicative act of compliment response (CR). The two participant groups’ CR strategies were found to be cross-culturally different and were found to be dependent on the participants’ respective cultural backgrounds. In addition, the data collected emphasize the fact that cross-cultural communication is a transactional mutual process and that both native and nonnative speakers of English are equally required to adjust their communicative behaviors to develop intercultural communication. The 30 American students and 30 Tunisian students filled a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) with 8 contextualized situations and sat after that for a semistructured interview. Interviews were audiotaped and transcribed for analysis.