Abstract This qualitative study was conducted to investigate Face-threatening acts and responses in Iranian EFL learners’ peer interactions during group work in online classroom in COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, six sessions of online English classes were recorded and then transcribed by the researcher. Brown and Levinson's politeness theory was used in the current study, which involves four main strategies: Positive politeness, Negative politeness, Bald on- record, off- record. As the population of this study, 30 male/female intermediate to advanced learners at Gooya institute in Ahwaz aged 15 to 25 were chosen using the available sampling method. The population of this study included high school pupils as well as university students of various majors. In Each session, the mentor presented a topic for the next session as a class activity, and each learner was supposed to prepare a question related to that topic. In order to managing the class, the mentor took part in the discussion as an equal member of the group and was asked to be treated like a classmate to maintain a friendly and intimate atmosphere. Separately, the researcher and the second rater observed and evaluated the recorded classes. The researcher and second rater received 364 sentences dealing with politeness from learners as a result of these online English sessions. The accepted results of both are then listed in Table 4.1 after consulting and examining the files. After observing the classes and collecting data from six classroom observations, it was discovered that the learners preferred the positive strategy above the other three strategies in general. This strategy, which has the highest frequency in comparison to other strategies, has occurred 131 times in both act and response. But if we don’t consider the responses, on – record strategy has the highest number with 101.
