Refusal Strategies in L1 and L2 among Undergraduate Saudi EFL Learners

Abstract

Speech act of refusal has been one of the important topics that has received a lot of attention among many researchers and theorists in the discourse pragmatic research over the past few decades. Though the speech act of refusal has been pursued by many researchers in eastern languages, a few studies have been done especially in the Saudi context to investigate the speech act of refusal among non-native speakers. Accordingly, in the present study, the researcher has tried to explore refusal strategies employed by a group of Saudi EFL learners when making refusals to invitations, requests, offers and suggestions in their first language (Arabic) and second language (English). To this end, forty-four ELT undergraduate students form Qassim University in Saudi Arabia, participated in this study. The data was obtained from 12-items written Discourse Completion Task (DCT) that consisted of various interlocutor statuses (low, high and equal). The analysis was based on the classification of refusal strategies proposed by Beebe et al. (1990). The results indicated that the participants used more indirect strategies in Arabic in comparison to English, mainly statement of regret, care for the interlocutor‘s feeling, giving reasons. Additionally, they mostly employed direct strategies to an interlocutor of lower status. The findings also indicated that students‘ responses to 12 scenarios in English were largely inappropriate and inaccurate because they were too direct, due to students‘ lack of knowledge of the role of social status when issuing refusals to a person of high status. When refusing in their native language, the students tended to be less direct in their refusals by offering preceding ―reasons‖ or ―explanations‖. Findings suggest that, to help students become better communicators in English, it is important to teach them directly the most common speech acts, especially those they might frequently use in their everyday conversations with professors and classmates. Moreover, implications and recommendations for future research were suggested based on the given results.