Lacking knowledge of social and cultural values of the target language, learners of English transfer their first language’s conventions, and thus fail to communicate appropriately. A fertile ground for pragmatic transfer is the face-threatening act of refusal that demands to be performed carefully, especially in situations such as that of marriage. The current study inspects the pragmatic transfer of refusal strategies as exploited by Iraqi EFL learners in response to marriage proposals. Two groups of participants are compared, respectively Iraqi EFL learners and American native speakers of English, in answering a discourse completion task (DCT) shared via email. The task encompassed ten marriage situations, each of which involved a person of higher, equal, and lower status. Data analysis was built upon Beebe et al. 's (1999) scheme of refusal strategies that introduced two main categories, direct and indirect, and the latter enclosed semantic formulas and adjuncts. It is concluded that there is indeed pragmatic transfer among Iraqi learners in terms of the length, content, and order of refusal strategies. Despite the fact that indirect strategies approved by the two groups, the semantic formulas and adjuncts told the difference that Iraqi EFL learners utilized statements of regrets excessively, a sign of pragmatic transfer than American speakers, and that, unlike native Americans whose reasons of refusals were specific, Iraqi learners mentioned extended and detailed statements of reason and explanation. Lastly, Iraqi learners' responses demonstrated no significance for their interlocutors’ social status as they tended to deal with all status indirectly and delicately.
Publication Date
5/29/2021
Publisher
The 11th International Visible Conference on Educational Studies and Applied Linguistics
Volume No
Issue No
Keywords
Beebe et al.’s taxonomy, Iraqi EFL learners, marriage proposals, refusal, American native speakers, pragmatic transfer
تبارك علي قاسم | Tabarek Ali Qassim | 1436