Production of refusals: Insights from stimulated recall

Abstract

This paper aims at determining production of refusals by means of role plays and stimulated recall. The combination of orally-elicited and retrospective interview seems to be useful in order to substantially improve our understanding of learners' performance of this speech act, as present study shows that although role plays are close to what can be considered natural data (as compared with, for example, discourse completion tasks), analysis of stimulated recall interviews revealed that many participants' behavior would have been different if they had been in real face-to-face interaction. Due to exploratory nature of this study, it should be regarded as a first step to a larger investigation into relationship between collection procedures of refusals and learners' verbalizations of their thoughts in order to ascertain production and perceptions of refusals.1 IntroductionRefusals are an interesting speech act to investigate in field of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) due to their face-threatening nature. Pragmatic failure may be deemed as being much more offensive than syntactic or lexical errors (Koike, 1995) in conversations involving both native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs). This claim has been corroborated by Yamagashira's (2001: 261) words: the speech act of refusal is highly problematic and susceptible to misunderstanding.Of paramount importance is thus making NNSs or English-as-a-foreign language (EFL) learners aware of impact of refusing in an inappropriate way in cross-cultural communication, since it has been widely reported (i.e., Rose, 1999) that pragmatic learning is poorly fostered in EFL context due to constraints such as large classes, few tuition hours and little opportunity for intercultural communication. Moreover, other research has examined pragmatic features in textbooks suggesting an inadequate presentation of speech acts (Boxer and Pickering, 1995; Vellenga, 2004). Taking these caveats into account, first goal of present study is to examine what refusal strategies EFL learners elicit for some given contexts in role play situations. Secondly, we aim to analyze via stimulated recall methodology, aspects of production of refusals which may provide useful in ongoing exploration of refusal behavior.Therefore, we aim at answering following research questions:1. Are learners aware of sociopragmatic variables when eliciting refusals? (Alcon and Guzman, 2010)2. Is stimulated recall methodology a valid indicator to report learners' accounts of their thoughts while producing refusals? (Gass and Mackey, 2000; Nabei and Swain, 2002)Two research hypotheses were suggested taking into account above research questions:Hypothesis 1: When verbalizing their refusals, learners will be aware of sociopragmatic features of given situation.Hypothesis 2: Stimulated recall will offer insightful comments in order to interpret and supplement learners' production of refusals.2 Refusal strategies: a taxonomyMost of on refusals have been analyzed using Beebe et a/.'s (1990) classification, which obtained on refusals by means of a Discourse Completion Task (DCT, henceforth). Several studies (e.g., Felix-Brasdefer, 2003; Gass and Houck, 1999; Turnbull and Saxton, 1997) have used this classification, including more or fewer categories. Recently, Salazar, Safont and Codina (2009) have proposed a taxonomy which relies heavily on Beebe et al. (1990); yet, we find Salazar et a/.'s (2009) proposal more suitable to serve our purposes as it takes both a sociopragmatic and a discourse perspective into account. Thus, contextual variables such as social distance and status are at stake in our analysis of refusal behavior. Table 1 presents this taxonomy.It should be noted that boundaries between strategies are sometimes blurred and that in some cases contextual variables may determine whether or not a strategy belongs to one category. …