One important aspect of pragmatic competence is the ability to comprehend and/or produce speech acts appropriately in different contexts. The acquisition and use of such an ability by non-native speakers of a language has been a major research line in interlanguage pragmatic competence (ILP) studies. Among different speech acts, the speech act of thanking is one of the most recurring acts, which has been comparatively less under the spotlight of ILP researchers. The purpose of this study is to explore how Iranian EFL learners express their gratitude and what thanking strategies they use in 14 different thanking situations. For this purpose, data were collected from 59 Iranian female advanced EFL learners through Written Discourse Completion Tasks (WDCT). Quantitative and qualitative analyses of data demonstrated a variety of thanking strategies were used by the participants in different thanking situations; however, the direct expression of gratitude without any preceding or succeeding complementary expression was the most frequently used strategy. Moreover, the diversity of different thanking strategies were almost similar in different thanking situations. The obtained results might imply that Iranian EFL learners need to be made more sensitive to both less direct and a wider variety of thanking speech act realization strategies.
