The use of refusal strategies in interlanguage speech act performance of Korean and Norwegian users of English

Anna Krulatz,Tülay Dixon

doi:10.14746/ssllt.2020.10.4.5

Abstract

The present paper describes a contrastive study of interlanguage refusal strategies employed by Korean and Norwegian learners of English as an additional language. The data were collected from multilingual first-year students at an American university in South Korea and in an English-medium program at a Norwegian university by means of an online open discourse completion task and analyzed using the coding categories based on Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss-Welts (1990), and Salazar Campillo, Safont-Jordà, and Codina Espurz (2009). The data were analyzed to compare the average frequencies of refusal strategies used by the two groups, and the types of direct, indirect, and adjunct strategies that they employed. Independent samples t-tests revealed significant differences in the use of direct and indirect strategies with small effect sizes. The differences in the use of adjunct strategies were not statistically significant, and the effect sizes were negligible. Descriptive statistics of the differences in the types of direct, indirect, and adjunct strategies also revealed interesting patterns. The findings suggest that multilinguals’ pragmatic performance is a complex phenomenon that cannot be explained by the differences in cultural and pragmatic norms of their first language alone.

Highlights

The ability to produce speech acts is a subcomponent of sociolinguistic competence, which accounts for the knowledge of the sociocultural rules that govern language use (Canale & Swain, 1980)
The present study aims to contribute to this relatively neglected area of interlanguage pragmatics research by exploring the following research questions: 1. To what extent does the frequency of strategies in the elicited responses differ between Korean and Norwegian users of English?
The consistently small effect sizes indicate that the differences between the two groups were not of great magnitude, which gives support to the argument that multilingual speakers’ pragmatic choices are more complex than predictions of refusal strategy choices based on their L1s may suggest

Summary

Introduction

The ability to produce speech acts is a subcomponent of sociolinguistic competence, which accounts for the knowledge of the sociocultural rules that govern language use (Canale & Swain, 1980). Refusals are typically formulated in response to a range of other speech acts, including invitations, requests, and suggestions, and entail a possibility to offend or upset the interlocutor. It has been suggested that refusals pose a face-threat to both parties involved in the interactional exchange (cf Johnson, Roloff, & Riffee, 2009). The choice of strategies used to perform a refusal is dictated by the contextual variables, such as the status of the interlocutor and the level of imposition. Performance of refusals requires selection of appropriate linguistic means and access to extensive cultural knowledge and can pose a challenge to adult language learners (Nelson, Carson, Al Batal, & El Bakary, 2002; Salazar Campillo, Safont-Jordà, & Codina Espurz, 2009)

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