Abstract
A growing body of literature has investigated impoliteness in many domains. Nevertheless, little research has examined impoliteness done by foreign language learners. Impoliteness used in interlanguage complaints by English as a foreign language learners was observed. The effects of interlocutors’ different status levels and social distance on the use of impoliteness were analyzed. Empirical data were elicited by means of oral discourse completion tasks from 50 Indonesian English as a foreign language learners in Central Java, Indonesia. The overall direction of the findings showed trends that status levels and social distance between interlocutors prompted different frequencies and strategies of impoliteness. The frequent use of impolite complaints was instigated by a number of factors such as the learners’ understanding about the speech act in question, their perceptions on the social distance and status levels of interlocutors, and the nature of the research instrument.
Highlights
The following section analyzes impoliteness used by the English as a foreign language (EFL) learners across three different status levels
The analysis focuses on the influences of different status levels on the frequencies and types of impoliteness
Impolite complaints made by Indonesian EFL learners have been investigated
Summary
In the last two decades, a growing body of ILP (interlanguage pragmatics) research has investigated the abilities of L2 learners to produce various speech acts such as requests (Biyon, 2004; Félix-Brasdefer, 2007; Hassal, 2003; Schauer, 2004), apologies (Bataineh & Bataineh, 2006; Kim, 2008; Warga & Scholmberger, 2007), compliment responses (Sharifian, 2008), criticisms (Nguyen, 2008), refusals (Al-Eryani, 2007; Allami & Naeimi, 2011; Wannaruk, 2008), and complaints (Kraft & Geluykens, 2002; Tanck, 2002; Umar, 2006; Wijayanto, Laila, Prasetyarini, & Susiati, 2013). The studies revealed a number of factors influencing different use of speech act strategies by L2 learners. Some of those factors include target pragmatic competence, L1 influences, collocutors’ social distance, facework strategies, and L1 cultural schemata. Studies have revealed the use of inappropriate complaints by L2 learners, little research has examined impoliteness in interlanguage complaints. An investigation of this area is essential for avoiding communication breakdowns. The investigation focuses on the influence of EFL learners’ awareness of different familiarities and social status levels of interlocutors on the applications of impoliteness in the complaints
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