Attitudinal Appropriateness and (Im)polite Mannerism inRefusals

The study aimed to examine Iranian EFL learners’ awareness ofrefusals. In so doing, the purposes were: (1) codifying natives and nonnatives’ refusal supportive moves based on Beebe, Takahashi, andUliss-Weltz’s (1990) rationale, (2) identifying attitudinalappropriateness in the structures produced by the non-natives, (3)determining the learners’ (im)politeness mannerism in expressingrefusal semantic formulae. As such, 60 intermediate Iranian EFLlearners, who were selected based on the results obtained from OxfordQuick Placement Test (OQPT), and 15 American native speakers wereasked to fill out a modified version of Discourse Completion Test(DCT) adapted from Beebe et al.’s (1990) rationale. The 12-item DCTencompassed tasks addressing refusals to request, invitation, offer, andsuggestion in response to interlocutors of lower, equal or higher socialstatus. The study also specifically included attitudinal ratings ofappropriateness and rating scale of (im)polite mannerism. The results ofthe coded data revealed that the learners showed deficiencies in refusalsin response to the interlocutors. While the learners were aware of thetypes of speech patterns, there were differences between the natives andnon-natives’ responses in terms of frequency, content, and shift offormulae. Data also indicated the learners’ lack of knowledge in ratingpercentages of appropriateness and (im)politeness strategies. Besides,there was a positive correlation between the participants’ attitude ofappropriateness and mannerism of (im)politeness. An implication of thestudy is that refusal is a complex speech act for foreign languagelearners so the patterns should be taught to resolve the learners’problem of pragmatic awareness.

کلیدواژه ها:

Speech act awareness ، Attitudinal appropriateness ، (Im)politeness strategies