Pragmatic awareness of ELT teacher trainees: A study of refusals of requests

Abstract

This study specifically aims to determine Turkish English Language Teaching (henceforth ELT) teacher trainees’ choices in using speech acts set of refusals in terms of directness from the aspect of pragma-linguistics in a Turkish, an English as a Foreign Language (henceforth EFL), context. The randomly chosen participants were 133 ELT teacher trainees (100 female, 33 Male), who are fourth-year students from ELT Departments of Education Faculties at four different universities (Gazi University (GU), Başkent University (BU), Middle East Technical University (METU), Hacettepe University (HU). The study used a questionnaire in the form of Discourse Completion Task (henceforth DCT) based on the Cross-cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) (Blum-Kulka and Olshtain 1984) for data collection. The study elicited judgments of various refusal formulations of the trainees in eighteen different situations in terms of directness and indirectness. The context of each situation based on three variables with different levels. These are gender (same-opposite), social status (low-equal-high), and social distance (intimate-acquaintance-stranger). Each of the eighteen situations has a different triplet of these variables. The findings are interpreted statistically and verbally. The refusal strategies gathered by this study were analyzed based on a sequence of semantic formulae provided by Beebe and Takahashi (1990). The findings of this study indicate that aspects of refusals may cause difficulties for ELT teacher trainees. The trainees of all the universities employed more statements of excuse/reason/explanation than of other strategies. This is further proof of the value of face. In the whole data what is obviously seen is that teacher trainees mostly prefer indirect strategies. The findings proved that the trainees were sensitive to the status of the requester, and they are less sensitive towards acquaintances. All trainees used most statements of indirect Excuse/reason/explanation when they refused people of each gender. Nevertheless, opposite-gender refusals require more elaboration and more care, which proves the trainees’ more attention to the requesters of opposite gender. This study suggests the need to raise their pragmatic awareness of Turkish ELT teacher trainees regarding the use of refusal strategies in particular contexts.