The apology and refusal strategies of Turkish, Polish and Latvian prospective English teachers

This study has the aim of comparing the apology and refusal strategies used by Turkish (Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University), Polish (Adam Mickiewicz University) and Latvian (University of Latvia) students who are on the final year of their undergraduate studies in the department of English Language Teaching. In addition, this study tries to find an answer to the question of how appropriate the use of the participants? apology and refusal strategies according to the evaluation of a native speaker.The data gathering tool used for this study is Written Discourse Completion Test. The Discourse Completion Test included 4 apology and 4 refusal situations with a total of 8 situations. The total number of participants in this study is 45, with 15 participants in each group.The apology strategies coding schema employed for this study is the one used by Hudson, Detmer and Brown in 1995. The employed coding schema for the coding of the refusal strategies for this study is the one used by Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss-Weeltz (1990). In order to compare how appropriate the apology and refusal productions of the participants, Kruskal-Wallis H test with the help of SPSS program was conducted. The ten point appropriateness scale used by Balcı (2009) in her master thesis is used in this study as the grading scale.Findings of the study indicated that all three groups use very similar apology and refusal strategies with some exceptions. As a result of Kruskal-Wallis H test, no significant difference was observed among the groups.