methodology non-native participants in this study were sixty ba students majoring in english literature and teaching english as a foreign language at khayyam university of mashhad. they were senior students, between 21 to 24 years old, who had studied english for at least three and a half years and had passed several courses including grammar, reading, conversation, and writing. this was assumed they had had enough proficiency in oral and written english and the length of time they had studied english was somehow similar. this could partly explain the relatively similar competencies that the students develop in their knowledge of english. they were divided into two groups of males and females with equal numbers. also, since english is a foreign language in iran, the participants have the same sort of communication with the native speakers, that is, through internet or tv/radio. ten native speakers of english from australia, providing the necessary data via e-mail, also participated as the criterion measure in the data analysis. they were five male and five female college students aging between eighteen to twenty years old. it is necessary to mention that their participation was voluntary. the non-native data were compared to the native ones to see to what extent the iranian learners’ suggestions match the native norms in each situation. 3.3 instruments in order to examine our subjects’ knowledge of suggestions we used a discourse completion test (dct) that seems to be one of the most frequent techniques of data collection in interlanguage pragmatics. results and discussion the results of the present study indicated both similarity and difference between native english and iranian learners’ production of suggestions. first, subjects on both dcts used remarkably more indirect strategies than direct ones. our efl learners employed more indirect strategies in the persian dct in comparison to the english one. this, we supposed, was due to a greater mastery over their mother tongue. another reason could be the fact that there are many instances in which the students have the necessary sociopragmatic knowledge of the situation, but lack the appropriate linguistic features. also, we examined the influence of the interlocutors’ social status on the utilized strategies, which showed us similarity in terms of directness level and difference in terms of the type of suggestions between native and non-native learners. that is, although the iranian subjects understood the formality degree of the situations like natives, they realized their suggestions through strategies which were different from those of natives. while the most favorite strategies in a (+power) situation were indirect among the two groups, a (=power) increased the percentage of indirect strategies. obviously, both groups tended to employ more indirect suggestions in a (-power) situation (fully and statistically discussed in the previous section). therefore, it is sound to claim that l2 learners may show similarity to native speakers in the sociopragmatic aspects of suggesting, but they differ in the type of strategies they choose. this could be in line with the findings of ellis’s (1994) study that even high-proficient learners do not acquire native-like performing of speech acts. thus, it might be concluded that, as claimed by some researchers (bardoi-harlig, 2001; rose, 2005), some aspects of l2 pragmatics will not be learned without the benefit of instruction, and this supports the view that instructional procedures may be facilitative to, or necessary for, learning l2 pragmatic behavior. we also took into consideration the influence of the speakers’ gender on the type of suggestion strategies they utilized. although there were deviations especially in the type of the employed suggestions, we rarely observed significant differences between the two groups’ performance. apart from these, the present study also showed limitations and advantages of using dcts. in spite of their lack of contextual variation, and that they provoke imaginary interactional settings, they can easily collect a large body of data with high control over the situational variables such as distance and power. this could be the reason why they are still used in the field of discourse studies.