A cross-sectional study of Iranian EFL learners' polite and impolite apologies

Abstract

Successful communication is the joint product of linguistic as well the sociolinguistic competence, with the latter competence denoting appropriateness which is closely associated with politeness. The present study aimed to investigate the politeness strategies employed by Iranian EFL learners in the speech act of apology. Data were collected from 30 EFL learners who responded to a discourse completion task (DCT) which realized the speech act of apology consisted of six situations. Data analysis consisted of three phases. First, to identify the apology strategies and politeness strategies, the study followed Olshtain and Cohen's (1983) taxonomy of apology strategies and Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness theory, respectively. Second, 90 apology utterances, comprising 50% of the total number of utterances, were assessed by two native speakers of English on a politeness Likert scale of 1=Polite, 2=Partially Polite and 3=Impolite. Finally, drawing on the native speaker assessment of (im)politeness of the apology utterances, the researchers analyzed the utterances qualitatively in terms of appropriacy and inappropriacy. The results indicated that a) Native speakers rated 27 (30%) apology utterances as polite, 40 (44.5%) as partially polite and 23 (25.5%) as impolite.; b) the most frequent apology strategies were an 'expression of regret', 'an explanation or account of the situation', 'expressing self-deficiency' and 'an offer of repair'; c) there was a significant difference between males and females with regard to their use of politeness strategies in apology; and d) the participants relied on negative and positive politeness strategies when apologizing. In conclusion, Iranian EFL learners were only partially sociolinguistically competent in apology.