Manifestation of evil eye belief in Algerian EFL learners' compliment-responding strategies

Abstract EN

In Islamic societies, there exists the belief that a compliment can invoke the evil eye unless it is accompanied by expressions that invoke God's protection.

This study aimed to investigate how Algerian learners of English as a foreign language use compliment-responding strategies, some of which are even offensive and face-threatening, to ward it off.

Data were captured from 67 English-major Master 2 students from Batna 2 University using a written discourse completion task comprising four scenarios and a semi-structured follow-up interview.

Qualitative analysis showed that the participants used different compliment-responding strategies: Some are non-confrontational such as “return”, “scale down”, and “disagreement” and others are confrontational such as when the complimentees use secular as well as religious expressions to defuse the negative effect of the evil eye.

The analyzed compliment responses represent an exemplary case of the tight link between language use and cultural practices.

In the light of the present study's findings, teachers of English as a foreign language are recommended to explain to their learners clearly how culture is manifested in utterances and show them which of their cultural norms should be used when speaking English and which must not be used.