Abstract: The thesis focused on uncovering the difference between the speech act strategies utilized by male and female EFL language learners from both public and private school high school students in the Sultanate of Oman. The speech acts researched in this thesis were those of commands, refusals, and greetings. One hundred males and one hundred females from both public and private schools were selected for each speech act investigated in the research. The mode of data collection utilized was the use of Discourse Completion Tasks. The results of the command DCTs demonstrated that indirect command strategies were the most common type utilized by the majority of the EFL learners from both school systems. The results also demonstrated that public-school students were at times unfamiliar with the requirements elicited by social norms in specific situations. Refusals also demonstrated that most learners preferred to communicate indirect refusals across most of the scenarios depicted. Often, expressions of regret and negative willingness were communicated. DCT results demonstrated that most of the learners utilized phatic questions and interjections to convey greetings. It can be recommended that additional research be conducted across varying grade levels as well as at university level to better gauge how varying factors can affect speech act use amongst EFL learners. Keywords: pragmatic competence, communication, EFL, speech act theory