The Role of Gender on Saudi English Language Learners’ Performance of Refusals

Abstract

Refusal is one of the most complicated challenges for the hearer, as a face-threatening act, which is influenced by social factors such as gender. Thus, the main purpose of the study is to investigate the role of gender on the speech acts of refusal by comparing the performance of English foreign language (EFL) learners and English second language (ESL) learners, males and females. EFL and ESL students’ data were collected using an online written Discourse Completion Task (DCT), which was modified and further classified based on Beebe, Takahashi and Uliss-Weltz’s (1990) model. A total of 32 postgraduate students participated in this study: 16 Saudi EFL students in Saudi Arabia (eight males, eight females) and 16 Saudi ESL students in the United Kingdom (eight males, eight females). The study found that gender has no significant role in performing refusals except in using indirect strategies and adjuncts by EFL males and females with different interlocutors and the number of instances used with different objects.