Saudi and Jordanian Undergraduates' Complaining Strategies: A Comparative Intralanguage Educational Linguistic Study

The present study is an attempt to explore, investigate, and compare the complaint strategies among two groups of Arabic native speakers, Saudi and Jordanian undergraduate students. To achieve the goals of the study, a discourse completion test (DCT) was developed and distributed to 150 male participants randomly selected from the governorates of Irbid and Riyadh universities to participate in the study. The findings of the study showed that Saudi and Jordanian university male students do complain to others using a wide range of strategies. Their complaints fell into four categories: Calmness and Rationality, Offensive Act, Opting-out, and Direct Complaint respectively. It was also found that Saudi university students' complaint comes first, while Jordanian university students' complaint comes second. The findings further revealed that there were some statistically significant differences and similarities at (alpha <= 0.05) among the Saudi and Jordanian university male students' complaint strategies to others due to the study variables. Conclusions, implications, and suggestions for further research are reported.