INDONESIAN SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS’ REFUSAL STRATEGIES IN EFL CLASSES

Abstract

Refusals need to be performed in such a way; moreover, if they have to be performed by students, who have a lower power, to their teachers, who have a greater power. The objectives of this article are to find out 1) the language/s used by the senior high school students to realize their refusals in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes and 2) the refusal strategies used to refuse their teachers’ directives. To reach the objectives, audio-recording of the English teaching learning process in a natural setting accompanied by observation was done in 37 classes at different senior high schools in Lampung Province. The recording took 2 x 90 minutes in each of the classes. The recordings were then transcribed into a written form and the refusals performed by the students as well as their contexts were identified. The identified refusals, whether they were expressed in English, Indonesian or local language, were classified by kinds of language, and refusal strategies by using Beebe, Takahashi, & Uliss-Weltz’s classification in Wijayanto (2013) . The results showed that the students produced refusals in Indonesian and English to their teachers’ directives. The refusal strategies employed by the students found in this study were ‘no directly’, ‘excuse, reason, explanation for not complying’, ‘statement of an alternative’, ‘promise of future action’, ‘avoidance by keeping silent’, and ‘avoidance by laughing’. Keywords : directives, refusal strategies, direct and indirect refusals