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This study aims firstly to compare the complaints of local native-Malay speakers and expatriate native-English speakers in Brunei in terms of move structure and levels of directness combined with the frequency of modality markers; and secondly, it attempts to address the relationship between polite behaviour and its effectiveness in eliciting the appropriate response from the hearer. Data from an oral discourse completion task show interesting similarities and differences in the complaint move structure between the two groups of speakers. Superficially, there appears to be no significant difference between the two sets of complaints in terms of levels of directness, but a detailed analysis shows each group employing different mitigating strategies to minimise the force of a complaint. Furthermore, responses from an acceptability judgement questionnaire indicate that being indirect, and therefore polite, may not be effective in eliciting the appropriate response to a request for action in a complaint speech act.

A survey of the field of Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP) shows that the Discourse Completion Test (DCT)2, also referred to as a ‘discourse completion task’ or a ‘production questionnaire’, has been the most frequently used instrument to evaluate second/foreign language learners’ ability to perform speech acts in a target language, despite the harsh criticism leveled against its low construct validity and its failure to represent the features of authentic discourse. Interestingly, focusing on the statement of objectives of a number of ILP studies using DCTs, one can notice that such studies rarely refer to the DCT as a language test. In addition, an overview of the DCT design process as described in several ILP studies shows that ever since its adaptation for the study of pragmatic ability (Blum-Kulka, 1982), there has been a tendency to use or adapt one of the existing DCT versions used in previous studies based on the argument of comparability of results. While a number of ILP researchers tried to improve the design of the DCT by the inclusion of rejoinders or by enhancing the prompt material (e.g. Billmyer and Varghese, 2000), few attempts have been made to reconsider the DCT development process. McNamara and Roever (2006: 253) urge for the need for “more research on testing of sociopragmatic knowledge and design of discourse completion tests for testing purposes.”The present paper starts with an overview of the literature about DCTs with special reference to the cognitive validity of the instrument and to previous studies dealing with DCT structure and content. Then, with reference to research in the fields of language testing and psychometrics, it shows that, whether used for research or instructional purposes, the DCT shares several qualities with language tests. As such, it is argued that the DCT should be treated as a language test and not as a questionnaire and should, thus, undergo a rigorous developmental process. Based on recent models of language test construction, the paper concludes with an overview of the stages of DCT development.

Notwithstanding the fact that extensive studies have highlighted the positive impact of flipped learning on developing learners’ skills, the literature has still been silent on its effect on Indonesian English learners’ communicative competence. To address this issue, this experimental study sheds some light on the significant impact of flipped learning method on developing English learners’ communicative competence. A total of 40 English learners of a university in Indonesia were grouped into flipped and non-flipped classrooms. Through the flipped learning, the course materials were delivered by means of Google classroom platform prior to the class, and the classroom activities were mostly allocated for communicative practices. To obtain the data, this study employed a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) questionnaire. Drawing on paired sample t-test and descriptive statistics, the results depicted that there was a significant difference between the learners’ pre-test and post-test scores of DCTs in the flipped group, and it significantly outperformed the non-flipped group. The results of TAM questionnaire further indicated that most of the learners appreciated the learning activities conducted in the flipped learning environment, and positively perceived Google classroom as an online platform for language learning. As the conclusion, it is a worth saying that flipped learning by means of Google classroom is an effective method to develop English learners’ pragmatic competence.

This paper focusses on compliment responses in the context of group undergraduate student projects, in a university in Hong Kong. It applies Geoffrey Leech's model of politeness. Although less well known than some other politeness models, it has proved relatively popular in studies of compliment responses, which are often said to involve a clash between the Maxim of Agreement (achieved by agreeing with the complimenter) and the Maxim of Modesty (achieved by mitigating the compliment, thereby disagreeing with the complimenter). This study deploys Leech's most recent work on politeness in the study of compliment responses. Using an innovative variant of the discourse completion task adapted to WhatsApp to collect text messages and metapragmatic comments from undergraduate students in Hong Kong on their messages, it reveals that acceptance strategies are overwhelmingly the most frequent type. This finding adds to the small body of work on compliment responses in Hong Kong cultures, and, more generally, to cross-cultural pragmatics studies on compliment responses. However, the interpretation of this result needs to attend to the detail. The key specific acceptance strategy in our data is the expression of gratitude, and this, we argue, is best accounted for through the Maxim of Obligation, a maxim proposed in Leech's more recent work. © 2021 Jonathan Culpeper and Kevin Pat, published by De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston 2021.

Adopting Brazil’s (1997) prosodic framework, this study examined whether proficiency and study abroad experience impact second language (L2) English learners’ spoken production of speech acts. Twenty-four native English speakers and 64 Japanese learners of L2 English participated in the study. The L2 learner group was divided into three sub-groups: (1) high proficiency learners with study abroad (SA) experience (2) low proficiency learners with no SA experience, and (3) high proficiency learners without SA experience. Participants completed an oral discourse completion task that assessed their ability to produce two speech acts (requests and opinions) in high- and low-imposition situations. Prosodic features including intonation, pitch range, and sentence prominence were analyzed via PRAAT. The findings revealed a complex interplay between proficiency and SA experience on pragma-prosodic production. Implications suggest that SA may have the added benefit of providing the backdrop for authentic contextual functions of prosody in high- and low- imposition situations.

Situated within the field of developmental interlanguage pragmatics, this cross-sectional study examines pragmalinguistic development in the request production of two groups of young English learners: Greek Cypriot and Norwegian, aged roughly 9, 11 and 13. Specifically, it focuses on learners' request head acts and modification across the three proficiency levels within the Greek and Norwegian groups, and across the two L1 contexts. Eighty-eight Greek and 79 Norwegian learners participated in the study. The data was elicited through a video-based oral discourse completion task, performed in groups of 3–5. Overall, a clearer developmental path was observed in the Norwegian learners' pragmatic performance, whose requests displayed significant differences between the age groups regarding head act sub-strategies, use of modal verbs, lexical downgrading and supportive moves. While also showing a clear linear development in head act sub-strategies, Greek Cypriot learners' only other area of development was the head act directness. A comparison of corresponding age groups from the two contexts revealed both areas of convergence (head act strategies and modal verbs) and divergence (lexical downgraders and supportive moves) with increasing age and proficiency, as well as areas that remained similar throughout (syntactic downgraders), suggesting different underlying influences on young learners’ request development.

The specialty of hybrid nouns is their different agreement according to certain features of the agreement target. They result from a conflict within in the gender assignment system. For example, the German noun Mädchen (semi-transparent diminutive for denoting a girl) is grammatical neuter but it refers to a female person. In German, nouns denoting females are feminine but diminutives are neuter. Since both rules apply, you can refer to Mädchen with a neuter (es) but also with a feminine pronoun (sie). There are different factors which influence the agreement pattern: the linear distance between noun and pronoun and the type of agreement target. So far there are only few studies on the influence of possible non-grammatical factors such as the age of the referent. In this paper, I elaborate on those factors and present the results of a discourse completion task focusing on the influence of a sexualized context.

This study examined the relationship between reported amounts of social contact and speech act strategies among 70 learners of Chinese enrolled in a study abroad program in Beijing. The participants completed a computer-delivered spoken discourse completion task (spoken DCT) eliciting three speech acts: requests, refusals, and compliment responses. Speech act strategies were compared between two groups of learners who reported different amounts of social contact (high and low social contact) as assessed via a self-report survey. Results showed that both high and low social contact groups favored using similar strategies to achieve the three speech acts. However, the high social contact group produced speech acts in a more sophisticated way: with a wider variety of request strategies, multiple refusal strategies used in combination and more deflecting strategies in compliment responses, compared with the low social contact group. The findings suggest that social contact helped learners expand their pragmalinguistic repertoire and employ more varied speech act strategies.

This paper compares the refusal strategies employed by English and Bulgarian native speakers in business settings with interlocutors of a higher status. The data collecting tool is a discourse - completion task (DCT). The refusals are compared in terms of frequency of the semantic formulas and adjuncts. The findings indicate that refusals towards representatives of a higher status are most frequently realized through the semantic formula Reason/Explanation, followed by Regret/Apology and Negation of the proposition for English native speakers or Statement of fact for Bulgarians. Some of the short patterns of strategies observed for Bulgarians are the combinations: Negation of the proposition and Statement of fact, Statement of fact and Warning, Statement of fact and Statement of limit and Statement of fact and Redirecting. These findings should benefit researchers, business people and negotiators who are to overcome intercultural, communicational and linguistic challenges in a globalized world.

The purpose of this study was to determine if Bloom-based Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP) instruction could enhance EFL learners’ use of the speech act of request. Based on their OQPT scores, 43 students were assigned to a control group (n=23) and a treatment group (n=20). A written discourse completion task (WDCT) was developed to measure participants’ use of the speech act of request before and after the intervention. The results pointed to a significant difference between the performance of the treatment group in which Bloom-based treatment supported by Vygotskian scaffolding was employed and the control group which received no explicit ILP instruction. The treatment group also yielded significant gains from the pretest to posttest and to delayed posttest, while no significant improvement was observed in the performance of the control group. In-depth examination of the participants’ WDCT performance indicated that the four pragmatics factors (correct use of speech acts, type of expressions, amount of information, and degree of politeness) measured in this study, improved significantly, but differentially, from the pretest to delayed posttest. Comparison of the pretest and posttest data suggested that the component of degree of politeness enjoyed the highest degree of gain followed by amount of information, correct use of speech acts and type of expression.

The current study is focused on the imperative politeness used by Pagaralamnese.The objective of this study was to find out the categories of imperative politeness in Pagaralamnese and its cultural translation into English. The method usedwas a qualitative ethnography of communication and the instruments utilyzed were wdct( written discourse completion task) and an interview. There were five respondents of Pagaralamnese. The interactive model was used in analyzing the data. The findings showed that there were six types of taboo words in Pagaralamnesenamely imperative politeness of warning, request, order, prohibition, suggestion., expectation.This article deals with discourses of imperative politeness found in various places in Indonesia. By using data collected from five respondents from Pagaralam city with socio pragmatic approach. Thoughsomereseachers claim that politenese expressions were translated in a certain lexicon withouth context , the fact that politeness expressions should be translated in a context or in a pragmatic way. In addition, it is strongly recommended to translate politeness expressions in a cultural context

T he present study measured the Egyptian EFL students' FL pragmatic competence in producing the refusal speech act. It aimed to determine the types of refusal strategies adopted by the Egyptian EFL students. In this regard, data were collected from 60 Egyptian EFL students. Participants were divided into two groups with 30 students each. Group A comprised students who are majoring in English and enrolled at the Department of English whereas group B included students who studied English as an ESP course at the Department of Tourism. Data were collected using a 12-item Oral discourse completion task (Oral DCT) questionnaire. Data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics like frequencies, mean scores and percentages. One way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted as well to judge statistical significance between contextual variables and categories of refusal and acceptance strategies. Findings indicated that Egyptian EFL learners varied in adopting acceptance strategies, however they tended to use similar strategies for refusing invitations. The study emphasizes the needs of teaching pragmatic behavior to Egyptian EFL tertiary students. Social contextual variables were found to have statistically significant influence on the selection of refusal and acceptance strategies adopted by Egyptian EFL students.

The upsurge of interest in L2 pragmatics studies has coincided with a growing interest in pragmatic assessment. Employing the most efficient measure of pragmatics has led many researchers to examine the existing measures to pinpoint the most useful ones. This study was an attempt to compare and contrast Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT), Oral Discourse Completion Task (ODCT), and Role-play with Natural methodology in an EFL institutional context to see which measure approximated Natural methodology. To this end, data (requests) were collected from 27 intermediate–level Iranian EFL learners in a natural classroom institutional context over 15 weeks, and then the WDCTs, ODCTs, and Role-plays with the same contextual features were selected to elicit the intended data. The participants’ requests were transcribed and analyzed in terms of Schauer’s (2009) request head act strategy taxonomy and its internal and external modification devices. The results of Binominal tests indicated that, in spite of some minor similarities, none of the elicitation measures could approximate the natural data. The participants’ employment of direct, non-conventionally indirect request strategies, and internal and external modification devices were more conspicuous in the WDCTs, ODCTs, and Role-plays than those in the Natural methodology. The study implies that data collection methods should be selected based on researchers’ objectives and research questions.

Gender and language studies in general have not been fully explored in most parts of the globe particularly in Nigeria. The objective of the study therefore was to examine the politeness and hedging strategies in the English language conversation of Igbo native speakers in Nigeria as well as establish whether men and women’s conversational styles have been gendered As a cross-sectional questionnaire and interview-based survey, the sample population was studied by means of ten-item questionnaire in the form of Discourse Completion Task and structured interview at seven Universities systematically selected from the South-East and South-South geo-political zones in Nigeria. The study instruments were completed, returned, transcribed and statistically analysed using the quantitative and qualitative tools for analysis of production and perception data respectively. Results showed that politeness and hedging are indispensable sociolinguistic elements in the conversational English of the study sample. Also, results revealed that to accomplish a communicative goal, the samples adopted different politeness/hedging strategies given the discourse situation. Also, findings showed that the female respondents were found to adhere more to linguistic politeness principles than their male counterparts considering the context hence demonstrating a difference in conversational style. The study found evidence to establish that females are more polite than males in conversations. In conclusion, findings of this study showed that respondents yielded to certain sociolinguistic factors such as age, culture, hierarchy, disposition and religion as they were believed to inform the use of a particular strategy or another.

This study examined the relationship between L2 proficiency and (1) appropriateness of refusals, (2) use of refusal strategies, and (3) multidialectal practices in performing refusals in Arabic. Using a spoken discourse completion task (spoken DCT), data were collected from 45 learners of Arabic at three different proficiency levels and from 15 Arabic native speakers. The situations used in the spoken DCT varied in power and social distance (i.e., refusing a friend’s request to lend money, refusing a neighbor’s request to lend a car, and refusing a boss’s request to stay late to work extra hours). Findings generally revealed a positive relationship between proficiency and L2 Arabic learners’ appropriateness, use of refusal strategies, and multidialectal practices in their refusals. However, results showed that native speakers solely employed spoken Arabic (i.e., the dialect), while learners relied heavily on Modern Standard Arabic. Analysis of refusal strategies showed that native speakers tended to provide vague explanations in their refusals except when refusing the neighbor’s request, whereas the learners preferred to provide specific reasons for their refusals. Moreover, advanced-level learners were substantially verbose; as a result, their refusals could be perceived as lecturing or criticizing their interlocutor. This paper concludes with implications for researching and teaching L2 Arabic refusals with special attention to multidialectal practices.

This study investigates how learners’ chronic motivational characteristics, that is their regulatory focus (Higgins, 1997), can account for differences in L2 pragmatic production in general and across situations with different levels of power, social distance, and imposition. One-hundred-twenty-one L1-Mandarin learners of English as a second language completed a regulatory focus questionnaire and a discourse completion task focusing on two types of speech acts: request and opinion. Multiple regression results showed that learners’ promotion focus, concerned with advancement, growth, accomplishments, positively predicted their pragmatic production in general, and especially in situations where the learner is subject to a higher degree of imposition, has lower power and is socially distant from the interlocutor. On the other hand, the prevention focus, which is concerned with safety, security, and calmness, negatively predicted pragmatic production, especially in those situations. The findings provide support for the role of motivational dispositions in the level of learners’ L2 pragmatic competence. Theoretical and instructional implications are discussed.

The present study aimed at investigating the pragmatic competence of the Yemeni Non-Native Speakers of English (YNNSs) through examining their performance in the speech act of refusals. The study followed the qualitative comparative analytic approach. For the purpose of attaining the required data for this study, forty (YNNSs) and forty American Native Speakers (ANSs) of English were involved. The questionnaire used for collecting data from the participants was a written Discourse Completion Task (DCT), which was developed by Beebe et el. (1990), employed for collecting the data related to the use of refusal strategies by the two groups of participants in English. The data collected from DCT was analyzed by using a loading scheme adapted from Beebe et al. (1990). This study revealed that the Yemeni NNSs were not pragmatically competent enough in English. In spite of the similarity between the two groups in their use of refusal strategies, the differences between them were more apparent. The total number of strategies used by the American NSs was almost double those used by the Yemeni NNSs in all refusal situations. This study recommends that instructors should design contextualized, task-based, oral activities and integrating the intercultural aspects of language into ELT textbooks. Article visualizations

In the framework of this study, the phenomenon of transfer is probed pragma-linguistically and socio-linguistically concerning marriage situations among Iraqi EFL learners. The study also strives to look at the refusal strategies most commonly employed by Iraqi female English as a foreign Language (EFL) learners compared to their counterparts, American native speakers of English. The study involved 70 female participants who answered a Discourse Completion Task (DCT), which contained ten marriage proposals to be refused. Each situation entailed refusal of a person from a higher, an equal, and lower status. The researchers adapted Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss Weltz’s (1990) taxonomy of refusal for analyzing the data comprehensively. The study’s findings indicated that Iraqi female EFL learners followed similar patterns of refusing marriage situations to American speakers. The most prevalent strategies used by the two groups were “reasons/ excuses and explanations,” followed by “statements of regrets,” and then “non-performative statements” with slight variation in frequency. However, the Iraqi learners’ native language and culture affected how they formulated their refusal; hence they manifested pragma-linguistic and socio-pragmatic transfer in particular areas. The areas of pragma-linguistic transfer included the literal translation of words, expressions, and structures into their refusal in English. As for the socio-pragmatic areas, the transfer occurred in certain Arabic culture features like elaboration, exaggeration, repetition, endearing terms, and many others in expressing the target language, English.

This study shows impoliteness as a form of face-threatening that can be intentionally caused by verbal threats in a particular setting. It investigates: what strategies and mitigators do Iraqi-Kurdish English as a foreign language (EFL) learners use in situations of threat responses? The present investigation paper aims to examine impoliteness strategies and mitigators by these learners when they respond to threatening situations in their context. Thus, it fills a gap in pragmatics literature by investigating the reactions to threats in an Iraqi-Kurdish EFL context. To this end, 50 participants have participated in this study. An open-ended questionnaire in the form of a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) is used to elicit responses from the participants. Besides, a focus group interview is conducted to support the data analysis. The data are coded based on Limberg’s (2009) model of impoliteness and threat responses to figure out the strategies used by the learners. Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper’s (1989) taxonomy of mitigators is adapted to analyze the mitigators. Overall, the findings reveal that the preferred responses surpass those which indicate dispreference by the learners. They tend to use face-saving acts when they comply with the threatener’s demand and opt for face-threatening acts when they reject that demand indirectly. Moreover, these learners use mitigators to attenuate the illocutionary force of their responses. Finally, this study provides some recommendations and pedagogical implications.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate into the possibility of pragmatic failure in the L2 production of Yemeni EFL university learners. It, in particular, tackles the L1 negative pragmatic transfer in the speech act of responding to compliments. The participants of the study are thirty Yemeni learners of English representing the target group and two baseline groups: thirty Yemeni Arabic native speakers and thirty American English native speakers. The researchers used a Discourse Completion Task as to collect the relevant data based on six complimenting scenarios. Data were codified into compliment response formulas and analysed statistically via SPSS in terms of the overall frequency counts of the semantic formulas. The results revealed that pragmatic failure is highly evident in the learners’ L2 production. L1 negative pragmatic transfer occurred in the response strategies of 'Comment Acceptance', 'Comment History', 'Praise Upgrade', 'Return', 'No Acknowledgement', 'Offer', 'Promise' and 'Wish'. They nearly represent 50% of the leaners' response utterances. The learners also showed a tendency of positively assimilating their L2 norms in the realization of compliment responses in half of their response utterances. Keywords: p ragmatic failure ; pragmatic t ransfer; Spe ech Acts; Compliment Responses , Yemeni EFL Learners

This study investigates the effect of flipped classroom instruction on developing Emirati EFL learners’ pragmatic competence. It compares flipped classroom instruction with the conventional method of developing learners’ request speech acts. To this end, the participants were randomly divided into two groups: experimental and control. A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was conducted as pre- and post-test to determine whether flipped classroom instruction is more effective than the conventional method in providing learners with pragmatic knowledge needed to produce request speech acts successfully. Data were analysed using a paired sample t-test. The results showed that flipped classroom instruction was more effective than the other method in raising the level of pragmatic competence among the participants. The study results also revealed that the participants’ performance on request speech acts in the treatment group remarkably improved in the post-test. This is because they had a more flexible and accessible e-learning environment, which in turn, enhanced their pragmatic competence after the treatment. The study concludes with recommendations for further research.  https://doi.org/10.26803/ijlter.18.10.6

This research is conducted to investigate how Indonesian people give compliment to others in English to find the formula of the compliment the students use. The subject of the research is 27 Indonesian students of English Department from three universities. The data are collected by giving questionnaire to the students using the Discourse Completion Task. Students are asked to complete the sentences for giving compliment. The compliments requested are about appearance which consists of hairstyle, dress and figure; and ability and performance which consists of test result, getting the scholar and cooking ability. The result shows that for appearance, the most used formula is by using the word look then the use of be+adj. For ability and performance, students use the word congratulation and be+adj for cooking ability. However, some students give compliment based on Bahasa Indonesia form, not English form by giving some statements which are not related to the context. It is affirmed that compliment is influenced by the language that the people use and it is different from one culture to another.DOI:10.24071/ijhs.2019.030110

Javanese shifting to bahasa Indonesia can be identified in Javanese young generation’s utterances. This paper aims at finding out how Javanese is getting to shift to Bahasa Indonesia and an alternative speech level. To investigate this phenomenon, we used DCT (Discourse Completion Task) and recording techniques to collect the data i.e the utterances produced by the English Department Students of Diponegoro University whose parents are Javanese. we used referential, inferential, and distributional methods to analyze the data. The results indicate that the students’ utterances can be identified as congruent Javanese speech level, Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Indonesia mixed with Javanese items, Javanese mixed with Bahasa Indonesia items, incongruent Javanese speech levels, and alternative Javanese speech levels. The mixing codes may be used for mitigating the force of threatening, or for hedging.

This study explored the effects of the interlocutors' power/social status on the mode of directness and the use of the politeness marker please in the production of requests by advanced L1 Hebrew and L1 Arabic speakers of English. Data were collected by using a Discourse Completion Task. The results showed that the use of direct requests decreased and the use of indirect requests increased in both groups of speakers as the status of the addressee went from lower to higher than the speaker. However, the pattern of influence of the status factor differed between groups in the case of please . Specifically, L1 Arabic speakers exhibited the greatest use of please in FL English when the addressee was either lower or higher in status than the speaker, whereas the L1 Hebrew speakers only exhibited a preference for the use of please when the addressee was lower in status than the speaker. These findings are discussed in terms of the relative influence of the native language and culture, knowledge of the target English language, and in the case of L1 Arabic speakers, the influence of Hebrew as well.

This study investigated the efficacy of different feedback conditions in developing accurate and fluent production of L2 English email requests. Sixty-nine intermediate-level Vietnamese EFL university students were randomly assigned to one control and three experimental groups. All the four groups received three hours of explicit metapragmatic instruction on email requests, but only the experimental groups received written corrective feedback on their pragmatic production. One experimental group received feedback without opportunity for revision. Another experimental group received one cycle of feedback and revision, and the third group two cycles of feedback and revision. Results of a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) pre-test, immediate post-test, and delayed post-test indicated that the combination of instruction and feedback had a positive effect on the accuracy of learners’ pragmatic performance. However, no clear-cut evidence for the effect of revision on the fluency of learners’ pragmatic performance was found in the study. The findings highlight the effectiveness of corrective feedback and revision in consolidating emergent L2 pragmatic knowledge, but further research is needed to understand how much revision is sufficient to facilitate fluency development.

This study investigates regional and gender variations of apologies in Putonghua ‘Standard Mandarin' and Guoyu ‘Taiwanese Mandarin'. Production data were elicited from 40 participants from northern Mainland China and 34 from Taipei using an oral discourse completion task. Results showed that speakers in both regions employed a similar sequence of strategies and demonstrated similar preferences for context-dependent strategies in their apologies, but Mainland speakers used a significantly greater number of strategies than Taiwan speakers. Gender differences were observed in the apologies produced by Taiwan speakers regarding their use of illocutionary force indicating devices. The study found an interaction effect of power relation and region, with Mainland speakers sounding more apologetic than Taiwan speakers, but no interaction effect of power relation and gender; the effect of severity of offence was not clear, which could be attributed to the gap between the predetermined level of severity and speakers' actual perception of it in each scenario.

Please fill up the following information accurately. (Please use Times New Roman, 12 pt. Conceptual Socialization in EFL Contexts: A Case Study on Turkish EFL Learners’ Request Speech Acts Realization Conceptual socialization refers to the process second/foreign language learners go through to transform their conceptual system so as “to fit the functional needs of the new language and culture” (Kecskes, 2002, p. 157). Therefore, the present study examined Turkish EFL learners’ conceptual socialization by analyzing the similarities and differences between native speakers of English and Turkish learners of English in their request speech acts realization. The data were collected from Turkish learners of English (focal group) and native speakers of English (baseline group) through role-plays and a written discourse completion task on requests both in Turkish and English. Participants’ responses were rated in terms of the level of formality, politeness, directness and appropriateness. The results indicated that although the Turkish EFL learners were higher level learners, they could not produce the required level of politeness, formality and appropriateness in their speech acts as much as the native speakers did. This study reveals that in EFL contexts, where there is lack of authentic social interaction and engagement with a community of practice, language learners’ conceptual socialization process is bound to their experiences of classroom instruction and L1 socialization. Information about Author(s)* Author 1 Author (Last name, First name) Şanal, MerveAffiliated institution (University) Bilkent UniversityCountry Turkey Email address msanal@bilkent.edu.tr Department & Rank Corresponding author (Yes/No) Write only one corresponding author. Yes Author 2 Author (Last name, First name) Ortaçtepe, DenizAffiliated institution (University) Bilkent UniversityCountry Turkey Email address deniz.ortactepe@bilkent.edu.tr Department & Rank Corresponding author (Yes/No) Author 3 Author (Last name, First name) Affiliated institution (University) Country Email address Department & Rank Corresponding author (Yes/No) Author 4 Author (Last name, First name) Affiliated institution (University) Country Email address Department & Rank Corresponding author (Yes/No)

The purpose of the present study is to compare the compliment responses (CRs) provided by 60 native Mexican Spanish speakers and 60 Irish English native speakers. Using a discourse completion task, 1080 responses were analyzed based on Herbert’s (1989) and Nelson, El Bakary and Al-Batal’s (1993) taxonomy. Findings suggest the existence of cross-cultural similarities in Irish and Mexican CRs in the frequency of deflecting comments and the mechanisms that are used to redirect the praise force. Second, the two languages differ in important ways. In responding to compliments, Irish recipients are much more likely than Mexican speakers to use a single strategy when formulating CRs. The findings further show that social factors (social distance, social power, gender, and the topic of the compliment) in both Mexican and Irish society seem to be crucial parameters in the formulation and acceptance or rejection of a compliment. Resumen El propósito del presente estudio fue comparar las respuestas a cumplidos (RC) producidas por 60 hablantes nativos de español de México y 60 hablantes nativos de inglés de Irlanda. La base de datos se recabó mediante un instrumento llamadodiscourse completion task, el cual permitió obtener 1080 respuestas, las cuales se analizaron usando la taxonomía propuesta por Herbert (1989) y Nelson, El Bakary y Al-Batal (1993). Los resultados muestran tres aspectos importantes. El primer resultado sugiere la existencia de similitudes entre las RCs irlandesas y mexicanas con respecto al empleo de estrategias de mitigación con el propósito de desviar los comentarios y redirigir el cumplido. En segundo lugar, los dos grupos difieren en aspectos importantes. Al responder a los cumplidos, los destinatarios irlandeses son mucho más propensos que los hablantes mexicanos a usar una sola estrategia, mientras que los mexicanos utilizan dos o más para formular las RCs. Los resultados muestran además que los factores sociales (distancia social, poder social, género y el tema del cumplido) en la sociedad mexicana y en la irlandesa parecen ser parámetros cruciales en la formulación y aceptación o rechazo de un cumplido.

Purpose of study: This is a pragmatic study dealing with the speech act of disagreement at the production level. The aim of the study is to investigate whether gender (the independent variable) affects the production of disagreement strategies (dependent variables) used by Iraqi EFL learners. The study is meant to help educators through diagnosing the learners’ pragmatic abilities which were reported by Iraqi scholars as weak and underdeveloped. The study also intends to enrich thespeech act literature which lacks gender consideration in the Iraqi context.Methodology: The study is limited to the analysis of the pragmatic strategies of disagreement within the theory of speech act in relation to gender. The study adopts a descriptive quantitative approach using a Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT) as a tool for collecting data. The tool consists of 10 open-ended situations to elicit data from 80 fourth-year Iraqi English as a foreign language (EFL) learners who equally were split into 40 males and 40 females. The study utilized MS Excel 2016 for statistical analyses of directness strategies with their dependent explicitness strategies.Results: It was revealed that both males and females employed similar amounts of explicit disagreement strategies but as far as the indirect strategies are concerned, females significantly used more indirect disagreement strategies than their male counterparts.Novelty/Originality: The current study is gender-based dealing with the speech act of disagreement at the directness and explicitness levels at the Iraqi EFL learners context. It revealed the learners’ current state of affair in terms of their pragmatic ability in the production of disagreements. It acted as a call for educators and syllabus designers to consider the teachability of the indirect aspect inherent in the act under study.

본 연구는 한국어 원어민(L1) 화자와 비원어민(L2) 화자의 직접 경험, 전문, 그리고 추론을 나타내는 증거성 어미의 사용 양상을 살펴보았다. 다양한 담화 상황에서 양적 분석도 질적 분석도 가능한 담화완성시험(Discourse Completion Task; DCT)을 통하여 14명의 참가자에게서 데이터를 수집했다. 참가자 중에 한국어 원어민(L1) 화자는 5명이고 고급 수준의 비원어민(L2) 화자는 9명이었다. 연구 가설로서는 두 가지의 결과가 예상되었다. 첫째, L1화자와 L2화자의 두 그룹에서 증거성 어미의 사용에 있어서 차이가 보일 것이라는 것이고 둘째는 L2화자의 그룹 중에도 언어 배경에 따른 차이가 보일 것이라는 것이었다. 담화완성시험의 실제 결과는 다음의 네 가지로 요약할 수 있다. 첫째, L1화자는 L2화자에 비해서 더 많은 증거성 어미를 사용했다. 둘째, L2화자는 적접 경험이나 인용, 전문을 나타내는 증거성 어미보다 추론을 나타내는 증거성 어미를 더 많이 사용했는데 L1화자들은 모든 항목의 증거성 어미를 사용했다. 셋째, L1화자들은 전문이나 인용을 나타내는 증거성 어미에 있어서 축약형도 많이 사용했는데 L2화자들은 주로 축약되지 않은 형태만 사용했다. 넷째, L2화자 데이터 중에 각 L1화자의 모국어나 한국어가 쓰이는 환경에 접근의 정도에 따른 영향이 보였다.

The present study aimed to examine the effect of proficiency on the pragmatic comprehension of speech acts, implicatures, and routines, as well as the way learners of different proficiency levels employ strategies when comprehending a pragmatic task. Thirty-three high-proficiency and forty-one low-proficiency Chinese learners of English completed a multiple-choice discourse completion task (MDCT). Of the participants, six were selected from the two proficiency groups to perform verbal retrospections to probe their strategy use in the MDCT task. The quantitative results showed that the high-proficiency group performed significantly better than the low-proficiency group on speech acts, implicatures, and routines. In addition, the analyses of verbal reports identified eight major strategies the learners used while performing the task, including sociopragmatics, hearer’s response, relevance, keyword/key phrase, life experience/world knowledge, amount of information, intuition, and multiple strategies. The high-proficiency group showed a significant use of multiple strategies, life experience/world knowledge, amount of information and relevance. The low-proficiency group, on the other hand, indicated a significant use of intuition. Close examination further revealed that the high-proficiency group showed more flexibility in strategy use, thus leading to more accurate performance. Conversely, the low-proficiency group did not vary their strategy use, which normally led to incorrect responses on the task. Finally, the study closes by providing pedagogical implications for language teachers as to how strategy instruction can be implemented in L2 pragmatics classrooms.

Offers and Offer Refusals: A Postcolonial Pragmatics Perspective on World Englishes Eric A. Anchimbe (2018) Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins ISBN: 9789027201737 (hardback) 9789027263285 (eBook). Pp. 330

It is hard to select and produce appropriate semantic formulas of apologizing for paying off violation of social norms to restore harmony. It seems that it is even harder to realize such processes of selection and production in a non-native language. The study is of three folds; namely, it examines the realization of the apology strategies by students of a senior Boarding School in Arabic and English as a non-native language, the effects on the contextual factors (external vs. internal) on the students’ apologizing, and the pragmatic transfer. The participants were 101 male and 101 female students, recruited to fill in a Discourse Completion Task (DCT), which consisted of eight situations about the flouting of the politeness rules in the context of the Islamic boarding school, by drawing upon the five semantic formulas of apologizing from Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1983) of Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP) for analyzing the data. The findings show that the students used identical semantic formulas in both languages. They prefer to use the “expression of regret” and “promise for forbearance” strategies. The findings also reveal that the internal and external factors affected the students’ selection and production of the apology strategies in both languages. In addition, the students’ pragmatic transfer occurred in linguistic areas, namely overgeneralization, inappropriateness, grammatical contrast, and conceptual transfer from L1 to L2, which are categorized into two types, namely, micro-negative transfer and macro-negative transfer. To conclude, these results indicate the students’ on-record-negative politeness attitudes towards the offended parties, which are determined by the contextual factors and the students’ lack of grammatical competence.

This study deals with the EFL politeness in refusals by students of different culture and interlanguage stages. The objectives of this research are to analyze the way how the subjects of different culture and interlanguage stages form politeness in refusals and the underlying reasons why subjects of different culture and interlanguage stages do it as the way they do. This study was a qualitative research. The data were taken from refusal expressions made by EFL Malay and Batak students with initial stage and free variation stage. The data of this study were collected by using elicitation techniques by using Discourse Completion Task (DCT), pictures and Interview. The results of this study showed that the politeness in refusal among the Batak and Malay culture are both realized by direct and indirect strategy. The difference between the two realization of politeness in refusal is that the direct strategies are used more in Batak culture than those used in Malay culture. Semantic formula are used less in Batak culture than those in Malay culture. The underlying reasons of EFL politeness in refusals are caused by the culture and interlanguage stages effect.

For years, linguists have noted that intonation patterns and discourse markers encode similar pragmatic meanings across languages. The present study investigates whether a functional compensatory distribution can be documented across languages by focusing on the expression of epistemic commitment in two Romance languages which have been reported to have either a rich or a very reduced inventory of intonational patterns (e.g., Catalan vs. Friulian). A total of 30 speakers (15 per language) participated in an oral Discourse Completion Task designed to elicit assertions with three degrees of speaker commitment. The results showed that while Catalan used specific intonation patterns for the expression of low and intensified commitment statements, Friulian speakers used only one type of pitch contour to express both types of epistemic commitment. In contrast, Friulian speakers made more frequent use of a more varied set of epistemic discourse markers for the two types of biased statements than their Catalan-speaking peers. This result suggests that a trade-off strategy can be observed between intonation and discourse markers across these two languages. This ultimately shows the need to integrate the study of intonational meaning with other parts of the grammar inside a more unified approach in comparative analyses of language. This research has been funded by two research grants awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Technologies (PGC2018-097007-B-I00 and FFI2015-64859-P MINECO/FEDER) to the Prosodic Studies Group at UPF and to the Phonetics Laboratory at UB, and by a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 SGR _ 971) to the Prosodic Studies Group.

Bu çalışmanın amacı kız ve erkek üniversite öğrencilerinin farklı iltifat durumlarında verdikleri iltifat yanıtlarını incelemektir. Çalışmanın verisi yazılı söylem tamamlama anketi aracılığıyla toplanan dört farklı bağlamı içermektedir: görünüm, performans, karakter ve varlık. 100 lisans (50 kız ve 50 erkek) öğrencisi çalışmaya katılmıştır. İltifat yanıtlarının çözümlenmesinde Holmes (1988a, 1988b) tarafından ileri sürülen makro ve mikro kategoriler geliştirilerek uygulanmıştır. Her iki grubun söylem tamamlama anketi ile elde edilen yanıtları nitel ve nicel açıdan karşılaştırılmıştır. Bulgular, genel dağılımın makro düzeyde Kabul, Kaçınma ve Ret olarak sıralandığı ve mikro düzeyde Takdir ve Yön Değiştirme stratejilerinin daha çok tercih edildiğini ortaya koymaktadır. Kız ve erkek öğrencilerin bazı yanıtları arasında anlamlı farklılıklar tespit edilmiştir. Makro ve mikro düzeyde her iki cinsiyette verilen yanıtlar iltifatın hangi bağlamda alındığına göre değişmektedir. Benzer durumlarda katılımcıların verdiği benzer cevaplar Türkçede iltifat yanıtlarına dair etnografik bir betimleme yapmamızı sağlamaktadır., This study aims at investigating compliment responses of female and male Turkish university students in different compliment situations. The data were collected through a written discourse completion task under four situational settings: appearance, performance, character, and possession. 100 undergraduate students (50 males and 50 females) participated in the study. Holmes’s (1988a, 1988b) macro and micro categories were adapted and developed to analyze the compliment responses of the participants. The responses of both groups obtained from the discourse completion task were compared qualitatively and quantitatively. Results indicated that the general pattern for participants is Accept, Evade and Reject strategies at the macro level and Appreciation Token and Shift Credit at the micro level. Some statistically significant differences between the responses of females and males were identified. Both at the macro and micro levels, how females and males respond to the compliments vary with respect to the situational context they receive the compliment. Under specific situations participants tend to reply similarly which help us to come up with an ethnographic account of CRs.

This mixed-method study was conducted to investigate the pragmatic performance of different groups of Saudi individuals when speaking English. More specifically, the study compared the types of strategies employed by graduates in the humanities, science, and English when giving advice in English. The study also examined the extent to which the participants varied their choices of advice-giving linguistic realizations according to their interlocutor’s social status. The possible influence of gender on strategy use was also explored. A total of 212 participants took part in this research, and the data were triangulated from a variety of sources: a discourse completion task (DCT), role plays, and retrospective interviews. The data analysis revealed that the participants’ linguistic competence seemed to have a significant influence on their pragmatic performance in terms of the variety of advice-giving structures available to them and their abilities to adapt their use according to the social situation. There was, however, evidence of pragmatic transfer across all groups’ responses, which could be attributed to their lack of awareness of the target community’s speech conventions. The study concluded with a discussion of the pedagogical implications of the findings and suggestions for future research.

Language learners' requesting behaviour has been the focus of pragmatic research for some time, including that of Chinese EFL learners, who constitute a large proportion of English speakers globally. The present study replicates elements of Wang (2011), focusing on the use of formulaic expressions and exploring the differences between advanced Chinese EFL learners and native speakers of English with regard to the use of request formulae. The study also investigates whether significant exposure to the target language in country is connected to a more native-like use of request formulae. Wang's Discourse Completion Task was adopted to elicit request utterances from three groups of participants: advanced Chinese EFL learners studying in China (at home students) and in the UK (study abroad students), respectively, and native speakers of British English. The findings show that, although in some respects study abroad students in the UK employed request formulae in a more native-like manner compared to at home students in China, neither group showed close approximation to the request behaviour of the native speaker group. The findings are discussed in the context of current debates, including interlanguage variations, interactional competence, and native speaker norms and intelligibility.

In response to calls for improving the quality of DCTs as data-gathering instruments, this study investigates the effectiveness of technology-enhanced discourse completion tasks (TE-DCTs) as a method for eliciting nonverbal speaker data. We used a mobile application to administer four TE-DCTs to native speakers (L1) and intermediate and advanced second-language (L2) speakers of Spanish. Each TE-DCT contained two scenarios with the goal of capturing nonverbal devices used in the speech act of attention-getting (i.e., devices used to draw the interlocutor's attention). The written description of each DCT scenario was supplemented with a short video clip to provide participants with nonverbal factors such as distance to interlocutor, bodily stance, and orientation of interlocutors. To capture nonverbal cues as part of the participant responses, the participant video recorded their oral responses to each scenario. The mobile application used was successful in capturing a variety of attention-getting elements, including nonverbal devices, in the majority of both L1 and L2 participant responses for all DCT scenarios. Drawing on this data, we argue for the use of mobile applications as an ecologically valid way to measure one type of pragmatic ability. In addition, we advocate their integration into L2 pedagogical practice.

This research aims to find out the most frequent strategies used by Indonesian female university students in expressing their refusal to sexual intercourse and the refusal strategies that they used to refuse the sexual intercourse. This research was carried out in 14 cities in Indonesia with 638 respondents (307 female respondents and 331 male respondents). The data were collected by using Discourse Completion Task (DCT) and interview to identify the sexual refusal strategies by female university students. The data were analyzed by using reconstructed conversation and Speech Act theory by Searle (1976) and Politeness of Brown & Levinson (1989) as a supporting theory. This research finds seven frequent strategies used by Indonesian female university students to refuse the sexual intercourse. The first is pregnancy risk reason (37,07%), next is legality reason (21,59%), postponement (15,48%) is at the third place, direct refusal non-performative (14,05 %) as the forth and is followed by religiouos reason (7,94%) at the fifth, direct refusal performative (2,24%) is the sixth and the last strategy is topic switch (1,63%). The data also show that most of Indonesian female university students refuse the sexual intercourse by giving pregnancy risk reason such as fear of being pregnant. From the reconstructed conversation, the data analysis show that most of them use Indirect Speech Act to maintain the relationship, the politeness and the positive face want of their boyfriend.

This study analyzed compliment responses (CRs) of Filipino male and female ESL students through a discourse completion task (DCT) adapted from Tang and Zhang (J Pragmat 41:325–345, 2009) on four situational topics of appearance, character, ability, and possession (Manes and Wolfson in The compliment formula: conversational routine, Mount Publishers, Amsterdam, 1981; Wolfson in: Wolfson, Judd (eds) Sociolinguistics and language acquisition, Newbury House, Rowley, MA, pp 82–95, 1983; Holmes in Anthropol Linguist 8:485–508, 1986). The 807 CRs elicited were categorized into Holmes’ (J Pragmat 12(3):445–465, 1988; J Pragmat 20(2):91–116, 1993) three-way macro-level CRs of accept, reject, and evade and their micro-level CRs. Focus group discussions (FGDs) were also conducted to supplement and corroborate data from the DCT. Results showed an overwhelming number of CRs of accepting compliments (Cs) of both male and female contrary to findings in studies of other Asian speakers in China, Taiwan, Japan, and Vietnam who generally rejected and downgraded Cs (Chen in J Pragmat 20(1):49–75, 1993; Baba in A study of interlanguage pragmatics: compliment responses by learners of Japanese and English as a second language, 1996; Tran in The nature and conditions of pragmatic discourse investigated through naturalized role-play, Lincom Europa, Muenchen, 2006; Yu in Mod Lang J 88(1):102–119, 2004), and also similar to English native speakers who generally accepted Cs (Chen 1993; Herbert in Am Speech 61(1):76–88, 1986). A preponderance of data, however, showed a peculiar Filipino way of accepting then underplaying the effect of accepting Cs through combination and modification strategies that avoid self-praise. Ability to do this is only possible with relatively adequate linguistic repertoire that make ESL learners pragmatically and communicatively competent. It is hypothesized that this language tendency also has an L1 culture connection.

This study focuses on contrastive pragmatics in the realization of the speech act of requests in Irish English and Russian in conversational and institutional settings. A quali-quantitative analysis was conducted to investigate how each language differs in realizing requests in each setting and to identify commonalities and differences between them. An original ten-question written discourse completion task (WDCT) was completed by 30 Irish English and 30 Russian native speakers, which generated data of 600 responses. Five units of analysis were coded, and descriptive statistics were used for comparison. Additionally, paradigms concerning politeness theories were used to explain marked differences between the request strategies of the test groups. Overall, the results indicated that Russian speakers make a clear distinction between conversational and institutional settings whereas Irish English speakers generally do not. In addition, high levels of social informality were evidenced by the Irish English speakers across settings while Russian speakers tended to enact identity in line with the context.

This study investigates the role of proficiency in the acquisition of conventional expressions as a pragmalinguistic resource in second‐language (L2) Chinese. One hundred and four undergraduates, including 57 learners of Chinese as a foreign language at 3 levels of university instruction and 47 native speakers completed an aural–oral discourse completion task presented in Chinese. Native‐speaker responses show that there are conventional expressions associated with specific situations and learner responses show that learners are increasingly able to produce the expressions as proficiency increases. En route to mastering the conventional expressions, learners develop sociopragmatic competence that allows them to produce the same speech‐act and content as native speakers in the same situations, thus creating contexts for the conventional expressions. Interlanguage analysis of learner production also reveals that learners attempt the pragmatically conventional expressions prior to full mastery, using key words of the expressions called lexical cores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study adopts a variational pragmatic approach to compare the dialogic sequence of the directive speech act of request and its reaction of consent versus refusal in Egyptian and Saudi Arabic. To this end, 413 Egyptian and Saudi undergraduate students completed a Discourse Completion Task (DCT). Data analysis indicated more differences between Egyptian and Saudi Arabic in request consent strategies than refusal strategies. Among the noted differences in consent strategies were Egyptians’ stronger preference for direct strategies and elaborate responses than Saudis who displayed more varied combination patterns and exhibited stronger gender differences. In refusal strategies, however, a general similarity between Egyptians and Saudis was obvious at the level of strategies, combination patterns and the influence of social factors.

The present study examined the apologies of 18 study abroad (SA) students during a short-term SA experience in Madrid, Spain. Apologies were assessed with a discourse completion task (DCT) consisting of five vignettes that varied across three variables: relative social status of the interlocutor, relative social distance, and seriousness of the offense. Based on performance ratings assigned to them by two native Spanish speakers, the students made significant gains in pragmatic appropriateness from pretest to posttest, on two out of the five individual vignettes, and on the five combined vignettes. Examination of the students’ apologies before and after SA further revealed that they increased several strategies during their time abroad. Despite these gains, other aspects of the SA group’s performance remained the same or, in some cases, moved in the opposite direction of the target norm. Moreover, the students also demonstrated continued overreliance on routine, formulaic expressions on the posttest DCT while underusing some important target-like mitigation strategies. Given the study’s findings, the researcher offers recommendations for teaching pragmatics before and during the SA experience.

Complaint is a face threatening act and it happens when a speaker reacts with anger to things which go wrong or to a speech or an action which affected him/her unfavorably. Therefore, complaints can engender social relationship breakdown. However, a complainer can use politeness when he/she aims to maintain a good relationship with complainee or to mitigate the severity of his/her complaint and face threat. This study aims to investigate the complaint speech act with regard to the strategies and structure used as well as the politeness strategies employed by Iranian learners in communication with other nationalities in the academic context of a university. Searle’s (1969) speech act theory and Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory comprised the theoretical framework of the study. The data were elicited through open-ended discourse completion task questionnaire from 50 Iranian learners. The data were analyzed using pragmatics as the approach within discourse analysis. The findings show that Iranians are able to draw on a variety of strategies and structures and adapt them in a flexible manner when faced with various complaint-provoking situations. Culturally, the findings show that Iranians are indirect and exercise negative politeness as they try to minimize the face threatening act of complaining. However, when the situation demands for it, they can be direct in their manner of speech.

This study is the first to examine contributions of proficiency subskills to pragmatic development. We used the latent growth curve modeling to reveal the causal relationships between proficiency subskills and pragmatic competence in 109 American learners of Chinese across two data points over three months abroad in China. Proficiency was measured by a standardized Chinese proficiency test with separate scores for listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Pragmatic competence was measured by a computerized oral discourse completion task assessing speech acts. Findings showed that pragmatic competence accrued along with increased proficiency. Changes of proficiency explained 54.1% of the variance in changes of pragmatic competence. Listening and speaking contributed more to pragmatic development than reading and writing did, indicating that when pragmatic competence is measured by an online spoken task, speaking and listening have stronger impacts.

The present study examined the impact of pedagogical intervention on students’ request performance during short‐term study abroad (SA). Prior to departure, students received explicit instruction about requests. During their time abroad, they were given tasks to strategically develop their pragmatic competence. Requests were assessed with a discourse completion task. Results indicated that over time the students improved their request performance, as rated by two native Spanish speakers. Examination of the students’ requests revealed that their use of strategies also improved. Retrospective verbal reports (RVRs) performed after the posttests indicated that during second language (L2) Spanish request production, the students attended to politeness, task outcome, and past experiences. In addition, the RVRs indicated that specific sociopragmatic factors and pragmalinguistic strategies targeted during the pragmatic intervention informed learners’ cognition during request planning and production. Findings suggest that when combined with pedagogical intervention, SA has the potential to facilitate students’ L2 pragmatic development.

This study investigated the potential cause of L1 Thai speakers’ persistent deviations from target-like negative responses to negative yes/no questions in L2 English context based on the theory of interlanguage pragmatics, particularly pragmatic transfer. L1 Thai undergraduates were categorized into two groups according to their level of L2 English linguistic proficiency. A discourse completion task (DCT), which required the participants to complete their turns in a conversation under different situations, were used to elicit their negative responses. The results revealed that negative pragmatic transfer, influenced by differences in linguistic action patterns of negative responses to negative yes/no questions between Thai and English, occurred in the performance of L1 Thai speakers in both lower and higher L2 English proficiency groups. However, the overall results suggested that the lower proficiency group tended to rely more on their L1 Thai pragmatic competence and showed higher tendency of negative pragmatic transfer than the higher proficiency group. The research indicated that negative transfer from the speakers’ different L1 Thai pragmatic influence from L2 English could make an impact on their non-target-like performance. Moreover, their level of L2 English linguistic proficiency and degree of reliance on their L1 Thai pragmatic knowledge could affect their production to diverge from L2 English pragmatic norms.

Refusal is one of many speech acts investigated in pragmatics. We usually do it in our life to reject other person’s request. People from different culture usually employ different refusal strategies since every culture has various way in protecting their positive face and reducing the threat that occur because of refusal ((Brown & S. Levinson, 1987). This study has two objectives: 1) to find out kind of strategies are used by Javanese teacher in performing refusal; 2) to describe how Javanese teacher use refusal strategies regarding the status of the addressee. This study was a qualitative study. The data were collected using discourse completion task (DCT) to elicit compliment responses from 16 teachers in Airlangga Junior High School Balikpapan. The discourse completion task (DCT) encompasses a variety of situations that required the participants to refuse the requests directly at them. Moreover, the data were analyzed with the help of Bebe, et all. (1990) in (Boonkongsaen, 2013) indicators. We can inferred that most participants used difference of refusal strategies. However, most participants tended to use the indirect strategies. Finally, this study also showed that the participants were more likely to be polite in their way of refusing requests.