Abstract-The advanced Iranian EFL students are capable of producing grammatically correct sentences, but they have a lot of gaps, lack of variety and form-function clashes in communication. Therefore, this pragmatic failure may specially be traced in the areas of speech acts. This paper investigates to explore the differences between the strategies of responses to compliments given by Iranian EFL students compared with Australian English speakers in terms of socio-cultural patterns. In line with the nature of the present research, a crosscultural one, 30 Australian English speakers and 30 Iranian EFL students were given a questionnaire consisting of two parts, each of which was composed of 8 open-ended questions. Based on the Chi-square inferential statistics the collected data were analyzed and interpreted and the results were obtained. The overall results suggested that some strategies of Compliment Responses (CRs) are cultural-specific like request interpretation "Qabel-Nadare" (I am glad to give it to you as a gift)" in Iranian culture and that there were various strategies of CRs which were used for different purposes by Iranian EFL students and Australian English speakers.

This study intended to investigate the comparative effectiveness of keyword and context method on immediate and delayed vocabulary retention of EFL learners. It also compared the rate of forgetting in the keyword and context groups. With a quasi experimental design, 40 learners from two intact classes in a language teaching institute in Khorramabad, Iran, were randomly assigned to the keyword and context group. The keyword group received the keyword strategy training, while the context group focused on learning vocabulary in their real context. The result indicated that learners in the keyword group recalled more vocabulary immediately after training and one week later. The results also indicated the rate of forgetting is more in the context group than in the keyword group.