A cross-linguistic study of refusals: An analysis of pragmatic competence development in Iranian EFL learners

The present study aimed to recast the issue of production of refusals by Iranian EFL learners, exploring the frequency, shift and content of semantic formulas with regard to learners' language proficiency (lower-intermediate, intermediate and upper-intermediate), status of interlocutors (lower, equal and higher) and types of eliciting acts (requests, invitations, offers, and suggestions) on realization of the strategies. Thirty Persian-speaking learners of English were asked to fill out a Discourse Completion Test (DCT), consisting of 12 situations realizing the refusal of 4 types of eliciting acts. In addition, 31 native speakers of Persian were asked to fill out the same DCT, rendered into Persian, for comparative analyses. Responses of 37 American native speakers in a relevant study (conducted by Kwon, 2004) were also reviewed for evidence of common components of speech act sets to establish a set of baseline responses. All data were coded and analyzed according to the taxonomy of refusals developed by Beebe et al. (1990). The results revealed that there were differences in the frequency, shift and content of semantic formulas used in refusals by Iranian and American speakers when responding to a higher, an equal, and a lower status person. For instance, while both groups used providing excuse/reason for the refusal, the American participants' excuses were more specific, concrete and to the point in both place and time. On the other hand, native speakers of Persian displayed a nearly high level of frequency shift in their use of several semantic formulas, whereas American patterns for refusals were quite consistent regardless of status level. Data also indicated pragmatic transfer in the realization of the speech act of refusal among Iranian EFL learners, and that there was a positive correlation between L2 proficiency and pragmatic transfer; upper-intermediate learners tended to transfer more L1 sociocultural norms to L2 and made more pragmatic errors than the lower-intermediate learners. The results indicate that refusing in an L2 is a complex task as it requires the acquisition of the sociocultural values of the target culture. (C) 2010 Elsevier By. All rights reserved.