Iranian EFL learners’ sociolinguistic competence: Refusal strategies in focus

Abstract

The current study investigated the extent to which Iranian EFL learners are sociolinguistically competent in performing the speech act of refusal. The data were elicited form a sample of 30 Iranian EFL learners, 15 males and 15 females, who responded to situations in a discourse completion task (DCT). The results indicated that the three most frequent refusal strategies are ‘excuse, reason, explanation’, ‘non-performative statement’ and ‘statement of regret’. The findings revealed the participants’ tendency toward positive and negative politeness in refusing. Regarding gender, Chi-square analyses revealed no significant differences between males and females in the use of both politeness strategies and refusal strategies. The refusal utterances were also rated by two native English speakers on a three-point politeness Likert scale (1: Polite, 2: Partially polite and 3: Impolite). The rating was that out of the 148 utterances (i.e., 82% of the entire sample of refusal utterances being 180 utterances), only 43 refusals, accounting for 29%, had been rated as ‘Polite’, with the remaining 105 utterances rated as either ‘Partially polite’ or ‘Impolite’. The analysis of the content of the refusal semantic formulas included elements of both politeness and impoliteness. Elements that contributed to appropriacy included indirectness, certain syntactic and lexical structures, intensification, among others while the elements of impoliteness were length of the semantic formulas (both shortness and verbosity), lack of total redress, mitigation and politeness markers, among other things. In general, the participants were found to be in need of improvement in the appropriate realization of refusal.