Spech act realizations of Turkish EFL learners: A study on apologizing and thanking

ABSTRACT Apologizing and thanking are considered to be highly complex speech acts as they differ cross-culturally, thus, these language specific semantic formulas are prone to misunderstandings. Since foreign language learners are under the influence of their mother tongue or have not been able to acquire semantic formulas specific to second/foreign language (L2) adequately, they face troubles when communicating in L2. Because of the influence of the mother tongue, in some situations, learners are liable to transfer their Turkish sociocultural norms negatively to L2. This study aims at investigating to what extent language learners have acquired semantic formulas in English, specifically the apologizing and thanking situations. Data was collected from 50 native speakers of English, 68 Prep-school learners, 61 Fourth-year learners and 44 native speakers of Turkish through discourse completion test including 28 situations.The study was carried out by comparing the speech act realizations of (Prep-school and Fourth-year) learners with speech act realizations of native speakers of English Findings of the study showed that learners, in their development of interianguage continuum, negatively transferred from their mother tongue in certain situations. Both Prep-learners' and fourth year learners' performance reflected that they transferred Turkish sociopragmatic norms, but Fourth-year learners at times transferred Turkish norms in more situations than Prep learners did. It was observed that the more formal and infrequent the situation is, the higher the possibility of negative transfer occurence was. Learners, in general, preferred simple semantic formulas of apologizing and thanking. Furthermore, learners realized some semantic formulas which were not used either by native speakers of English or native speakers of Turkish. In other words, it was discovered that the interianguage system of learners led them to prefer different semantic formulas although the mother tongue and target language sociopragmatic norms were similar.