A Cross-cultural Investigation of Refusals by Turkish-speaking EFL Learners: A Case Study

ABSTRACT: The present study aimed to identify the refusal strategies used by the Turkishspeaking EFL teacher trainees, and also find out if there was any evidence of pragmatic transfer in their refusal realisations. For this purpose, two research questions were formulated. The first question aimed to investigate the strategies used by the Turkish-speaking EFL learners while performing the speech act of refusal, and the second question aimed to find out if there was any evidence of pragmatic transfer in their refusal responses. This research study was designed as a qualitative case study which aimed to describe the current situation of the phenomena in terms of the Turkish-speaking EFL learners’ pragmatic behaviour. To this end, three groups of subjects participated in the study. Two of them were the control groups, which included 16 native speakers of English (NSEs) for the English baseline data, 16 native speakers of Turkish (NSTs) for the Turkish baseline data. The third group of participants involved 150 Turkish-speaking EFL teacher trainees who were studying in the Department of ELT of the Faculty of Education at Eastern Mediterranean University. The data were collected by means of a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) which was developed by Beebe et al. (1990). The original version of the DCT was given to the NSEs, the back-translated version of it was given to the NSTs and finally, the interlanguage (IL) data were elicited via the adapted version, which was distributed to the Turkish-speaking EFL teacher trainees. In order to gain more insight into the IL group’s level of pragmatic competence, interviews were conducted with the three instructors who were offering courses at the BA level and the course policy sheets and course materials were examined. In order to identify the refusal strategies utilised by the IL group, the collected data were coded and categorised according to the refusal taxonomy proposed by Beebe et al. (1990) and Kwon (2003). In order to find out whether there was any evidence of pragmatic transfer in the refusal behaviours of the IL group, their refusal responses were compared to those of the baseline groups. The results of the study showed cross-cultural differences and similarities between the research groups in performing the speech act of refusal with regard to the choice and frequency of strategies. Besides this, the type of eliciting speech act and the refuser’s social status were also found to influence the refusal responses of the research groups. As for the pragmatic transfer, it was found out that the IL group exhibited three different patterns in their refusal responses. In other words, they were observed to converge with and/or divert from the NSEs regarding the choice and frequency of refusal strategies. In addition to these two patterns, the results pointed out that they also performed the speech act of refusal in a manner different from the baseline groups, which indicated they did not blindly copy the target or native pragmatic norms all the time but they were engaged in a creative construction process in interlanguage pragmatic development. In light of the results, this study proposed some pedagogical implications which may help language teachers to enhance their students’ level of pragmatic competence and minimise pragmatic failure regarding the use of speech acts, more specifically, the speech act of refusal. Finally, it is hoped that the present study provides suggestions for further research. Some useful areas which are left open for further investigation include expanding the scope of inquiry by focusing on other speech acts such as complaints, apologies and suggestions, etc., collecting more authentic data, examining the content and order of semantic formulas and the relationship between the degree of pragmatic transfer and the learners’ level of target language proficiency. The researchers may also aim to investigate the effects of instruction on developing the language learners’ level of pragmatic competence. Such kinds of studies can make it possible to gain detailed insights into the pragmatic behaviours of the language learners in the target language. Key words: pragmatic competence, pragmatic transfer, the speech act of refusal, refusal strategies, interlanguage pragmatics. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………