Speech Acts or Speech Act Sets of Refusals: Some Evidence from Thai L2 Learners

Apart from speaking competence and vocabulary used, refusal strategies play an important role in a communication scenario. This paper investigates how Thai students realise the speech act of refusals to the initiating acts of suggestions, offers, requests, and invitations with regard to the status of the interlocutor. To achieve this objective, 157 Thai university students were asked to respond to 12 scenarios listed in an Oral Discourse Completion Test (ODCT) eliciting refusals of three requests, three invitations, three suggestions, and three offers in lower, equal, and higher status scenarios. All responses were systematically collected, transcribed, coded, and classified based on the refusal taxonomy developed by Beebe, Takahasik, and Uliss-Weltz (1990). The results revealed some discrepancies in the frequency, shift, and content of linguistic forms used in the refusals. In particular, most Thai students reported the use of indirectness, and a combination of direct and indirect strategies was used most frequently. Particularly, excuses, reasons, and explanations were the strategies frequently used in refusals with the different interactants, suggesting that refusals should not be treated as a speech act but as speech act sets that include one or more components. The study sheds light on the importance of socio-cultural factors that affect successful communication. It contributes to the knowledge of pragmatic behaviour in the L2 or intercultural pragmatics and also provides suggestions for integrating pragmatic instruction to foster the pragmatic competence of L2 learners.