that both Syrians and Americans are more likely to either accept or mitigate the force of the compliment than to reject it. Both groups employed similar response types (e.g. agreeing utterances, compliment returns, and deflecting or qualifying comments); however, they also differed in their responses. US recipients were much more likely than the Syrians to use appreciation tokens and a preferred Syrian response, acceptance + formula, does not appear in the US data at all. Recently, in a conversation with an American who had taught EFL in Damascus for two years, one of the researchers mentioned that she was investigating the strategies Syrians use in responding to compliments. The teacher looked surprised and asked, ‘What’s there to study? Syrians just say Shukran (“thank you”). When I’m complimented in Arabic, that’s what I say – Shukran.’ This teacher was apply-ing a rule from his L1 speech community to an L2 speech community. The rule he was transferring is one that American parents teach their children and one that is taught in etiquette books: ‘When you are complimented, the only response nec-essary is “Thank you” ’ (Johnson 1979: 43). Compliment responses in Syrian Arabic, as shall become clear later, are much more complex than saying Shukran when praised. In this paper, we report on a study of Syrian Arabic speakers’ and American English speakers’ verbal responses to compliments. The purpose of the study is to better understand the strategies used by Syrians and Americans in responding to compliments, to discover similarities and differences between the two groups, and to relate the findings to second language acquisition and second language teaching.