Cross-cultural Perceptions of Impoliteness by Native English Speakers and EFL Learners: The Case of Apology Speech Act

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 304-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zia Tajeddin ◽  
Minoo Alemi ◽  
Sajedeh Razzaghi
2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanju Deveci

Many Turkish EFL learners struggle with giving complaints and criticisms in the EFL classroom. Language instructors must find way to provide students with the linguistic and pragmatic elements of EFL to be able to appropriately complain as EFL users. The purpose of this study is to investigate the complaint speech used by Turkish EFL learners in two different situations: speaking to a commiserating teacher and speaking to a contradicting teacher. Four kinds of data sources were used to collect data in the classroom: twenty native English speakers’ role-plays, twenty-five Turkish native speakers’ role-plays, and forty students’ role-plays. The subjects’ complaint speech act sets were a coding scheme borrowed from a previously conducted study by Murphy and Neu (1996). The baseline and the inter-language data were compared to see to what extent they were similar or different, whether or not the Turkish EFL learners made positive and negative transfer, and if there were any features unique to the inter-language of the learners. The findings revealed that when speaking to the commiserating teacher, students made both positive and negative transfer in using ‘demand’. The students speaking to the contradicting teacher made positive transfer in the components ‘explanation of purpose’, ‘complaint’ and ‘justification’. The component ‘demand’ was subject to negative transfer.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Lee ◽  
Robert Poch ◽  
Ann Smith ◽  
Margaret Delehanty Kelly ◽  
Hannah Leopold

The purpose of this article is to describe and reflect on a pilot faculty learning cohort that was designed to improve the frequency and the quality of cross-national and cross-cultural student interactions in the participants’ undergraduate courses. The cohort offered a space where faculty could gain insight on the experience of international students (IS) and non-native English speakers (NNES), develop knowledge about best practices and relevant research, and explore and test tools to promote inclusion and interactions. The cohort focused on cross-national interactions because strong and consistent data indicate that international and domestic students seek more purposeful and substantive interactions, both in and out of the classroom, but lack the confidence and structure to engage in them.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 693
Author(s):  
SIU Fiona Kwai-peng

This study examines the pragmatic judgments made on formal request letters written by adult L2 learners of English by two groups of EFL teachers at a university in Hong Kong. A pragmatic Judgment Questionnaire was completed by each of the sixteen teachers, comprising eight native Cantonese speakers (CSTs) and eight native English speakers (ESTs). Pragmatic judgment was examined by investigating four pragmatic variables -- i.e., politeness, directness, formality and amount of information. Main research findings suggest that there were no significant differences between the two groups of teachers in their pragmatic judgments except for their views on: a) what constituted “unnaturally polite” expressions, b) whether negative words would help achieve the purpose of a message, c) what supporting moves should be avoided, and d) what writing plans they preferred. Qualitative analysis revealed examples of "unnaturally polite" expressions (e.g., “forgive”) and supportive moves (e.g. compensating class teachers) considered appropriate by CSTs only.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Atefeh Eshraghi ◽  
Mohsen Shahrokhi

<p>Speech acts are interesting areas of research and there has been much research on speech acts. Complaint is a type of speech act and how to use it in interaction is important to EFL learners. The complaint strategies employed by Iranian female EFL learners and female English native speakers were compared in this study. Also, the effects of contextual variables (Social distance and Social power) on the choice of complaint strategies by Iranian female EFL learners and female native English speakers were studied in this research. Thirty Iranian female EFL learners and thirty female native English speakers participated in this study. The two instruments which were used in this study included Oxford Placement Test (OPT) and Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The (DCT), as an open-ended questionnaire was administrated to them to elicit complaint speech acts. Then, the collected data were analyzed according to a modified taxonomy of complaint strategies proposed by Trosoborg (1995). The results indicated that there was a significant difference between Iranian female EFL learners and female native English speakers in terms of using complaint strategies. Iranian female EFL learners used indirect complaint, while female native English speakers used the direct complaint more frequently; and contextual variables had a great influence on complaint strategy choice by participants of two groups.</p>


SAGE Open ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 215824401667947
Author(s):  
Shiler Yazdanfar ◽  
Alireza Bonyadi

Cross-cultural studies of speech acts in different linguistic contexts might have interesting implications for language researchers and practitioners. Drawing on the Speech Act Theory, the present study aimed at conducting a comparative study of request speech act in Persian and English. Specifically, the study endeavored to explore the request strategies used in daily interactions of Persian and English speakers based on directness level and supportive moves. To this end, English and Persian TV series were observed and requestive utterances were transcribed. The utterances were then categorized based on Blum-Kulka and Olshtain’s Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Pattern (CCSARP) for directness level and internal and external mitigation devises. According to the results, although speakers of both languages opted for the direct level as their most frequently used strategy in their daily interactions, the English speakers used more conventionally indirect strategies than the Persian speakers did, and the Persian speakers used more non-conventionally indirect strategies than the English speakers did. Furthermore, the analyzed data revealed the fact that American English speakers use more mitigation devices in their daily interactions with friends and family members than Persian speakers.


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