The main focus of this book, which is of the most important and most frequent speech acts used in multicultural settings, is the speech act of apology. It investigates native Persian-speaking ESL university students' apology strategies based on Cohen and Olshtain's(1981) framework, including those which do not imply an apology to find out differences attributed to gender. It is hoped that the findings of this book will have implications for ESL/EFL pedagogy.