Abstract
This study examines the apology strategies used by 30 Saudi EFL teachers in Najran, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), paying special attention to variables such as social distance and power and offence severity. The study also delineates gender differences in the respondents’ speech as opposed to studies that only examined speech act output by native and non-native speakers of English. To this end, the study employs a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) that consists of 10 situations designed to test how the respondents would react if they imagine that they belong to different types of social status whether higher, lower or equal. In addition, social distance and power have been taken into consideration in designing the ten situations included in the test used in this study. The results reveal that Illocutionary Force Indicating Device (IFID) is the most used apology strategy by the Saudi respondents followed by downgrading responsibility (DR), upgrader, offer of repair, taking on responsibility and then verbal redress. The results also reveal that gender has a great impact on the use of apology strategies in various ways. For instance, the IFID strategy and the upgrader strategy are used by males more than their female counterparts, whereas females use the DR strategy more than their male counterparts. It has been argued that some of the respondents’ answers to the test were influenced by their mother tongue, as reported in previous studies conducted on apology strategies. The study discusses the results elicited via the DCT and compares them with those of previous studies on apology strategies and other speech acts. Finally, the study concludes with recommendations for further research. Keywords: pragmatics, apology strategies, Saudi EFL teachers, interlanguage pragmatics, target culture
Highlights
In the realm of second language learning, the cultural and social aspects of English as a target language have a paramount importance on the success of that process
One may observe that the investigation of English apology strategies used by EFL learners is constantly marked by interlanguage pragmatics, which is mainly attributed to what is known as pragmatic transfer between the mother tongue and the target language, as shown by Qorina’s (2012) study which demonstrates the transfer of Indonesian language into the pragmatics output
Thijittang’s and Le’s (2010) study shows that the interlanguage pragmatics of Thai native speakers of English are highly dominated by the influence of social factors related to the social distance, social status and the degree of offence severity
Summary
In the realm of second language learning, the cultural and social aspects of English as a target language have a paramount importance on the success of that process. This is the main concern of pragmatics according to Levinson (1983: 21), he posited that “Pragmatics is the study of the relation between language and context that are basic to an account of language understanding.” In this concern, Blum- Kulka, Olshtain and Cohen, (1984) explained that the concept of appropriateness differs from one language to another based on the difference between the different cultures of these two languages (see Altakhaineh & Zibin, 2014). It measures the effect of gender on the participants’ use of apology strategies in English
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