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Refusal Strategies of Native Spanish Speakers in Spanish and in English and of Native English Speakers in English.

01 Mar 1997-
TL;DR: The authors analyzed patterns in one speech act, that of refusal, in 60 native English speakers (responding in English only) and 120 native Spanish speakers (60 responding in English and 60 in Spanish).
Abstract: A study analyzed patterns in one speech act, that of refusal, in 60 native English speakers (responding in English only) and 120 native Spanish speakers (60 responding in English and 60 in Spanish). Native English speakers were college students in the United States and Spanish speakers were students in Spain. A questionnaire was used to elicit refusals for 20 situations. Data were also gathered concerning the subjects' age, gender, level of education attained, and country of origin. Analysis of the responses resulted in a taxonomy of 43 refusal strategies. Results indicate the three groups had different refusal patterns. In some cases, Spanish speakers refused similarly in Spanish (SS) and English (SE) but differently from English speakers (EE), suggesting pragmatic transfer in the SE group. However, it was also found that in some cases the refusal strategies of SEs approximated those of the EEs, and in other cases the SE strategies were different from both other groups. In addition, it was found that all three groups used different refusal strategies in refusals for moral, educational, social, financial, and physical reasons. (Author/MSE) ******************************************************************************** * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * from the original document. * ********************************************************************************

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper investigated the refusal strategies of Iranian English-language learners and Anglo-Australian students to shed light on possible areas of cross-cultural miscommunication and found that the performance of Iranian and Australian participants differed from each other to a degree that could lead to inter-culture miscommunication.

36 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper investigated the use of refusal by Persian and Kurdish speakers (PSs and KSs) as well as the frequency and shift of semantic formulas with regard to types of eliciting acts and status of the interlocutor.

17 citations

Dissertation
01 Jan 2018
TL;DR: The authors evaluated the pragmatic competence of Saudi EFL learners in Saudi Arabia and Saudi ESL learners in the UK, and found that the ESL and NSE groups showed relatively more similarities when compared with the EFL group in terms of directness, politeness norms and modifications.
Abstract: Pragmatic competence, the ability to use language effectively in a contextually appropriate fashion, has been a central concern in pragmatic studies for more than four decades. A large number of pragmatic competence studies have examined the pragmatics of native and non-native speakers of English, investigating the significance of the spread of the language across the globe. In the majority of studies, the focus has been on the pragmatic norms of native speakers, the development of English language learners’ pragmatic competence, and the apparent pragmatic differences between native speakers and language learners. However, there is a dearth of studies contrasting the pragmatic competence of EFL and ESL learners. The present study targets this under researched area, by evaluating the pragmatic competence of Saudi EFL learners in Saudi Arabia and Saudi ESL learners in the UK. More specifically, it investigates how EFL and ESL groups perform the speech acts of requests and refusals in English, in contrast with British native speakers of English (NSE) as a point of comparison. The participants in this study are 90 Saudi EFL learners, 90 Saudi ESL learners, and 60 British NSE. The data set, including the utterances of requests and refusals in English, was compiled using two quantitative research methods: (1) a discourse-completion task (DCT) comprising nine request scenarios and nine refusal scenarios, and (2) a role-play task (RPT), involving six request scenarios and nine refusal scenarios. The pragmatic features of the requests were categorised, quantified and analysed using the classifications set out by Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper (1989), whilst the pragmatic features of refusals were categorised according to the Universal Refusal Strategies Taxonomy of Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss-Weltz (1990, pp. 72-73). The results indicate notable pragmatic similarities and differences in the requests and refusals across the three groups. To summarise, the ESL and NSE groups’ results showed relatively more similarities when compared with the EFL group, in terms of directness, politeness norms and modifications. The data also revealed that sociological variables (e.g. power, social distance) influence participants’ speech acts, and the length of time spent learning English and the intensity of communication affect the non-native groups’ acquisition of speech acts.

15 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the main objective of the study was to investigate the refusal speech act among Omani EFL college students and examine how they refused in various situations and whether their responses were appr...
Abstract: The main objective of this study was to investigate the refusal speech act among Omani EFL college students. It examined how they refused in various situations and whether their responses were appr...

13 citations

References
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Methodological preliminaries of generative grammars as theories of linguistic competence; theory of performance; organization of a generative grammar; justification of grammar; descriptive and explanatory theories; evaluation procedures; linguistic theory and language learning.

12,586 citations


"Refusal Strategies of Native Spanis..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Refusal Patterns 3 REFUSAL STRATEGIES OF NATIVE SPANISH SPEAKERS IN SPANISH AND IN ENGLISH AND OF NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS IN ENGLISH Up until the late 1960's, language proficiency meant grammatical competence (Chomsky, 1965)....

    [...]

  • ...Refusal Patterns 3 REFUSAL STRATEGIES OF NATIVE SPANISH SPEAKERS IN SPANISH AND IN ENGLISH AND OF NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS IN ENGLISH Up until the late 1960's, language proficiency meant grammatical competence (Chomsky, 1965). In 1966 Hymes redefined language proficiency and coined the phrase "communicative competence." Hymes (1972) showed that a language learner could not survive without learning what is "feasible," "appropriate," "possible," and "done" with the linguistic or grammatical forms (p....

    [...]

Book
01 May 1965
TL;DR: Generative grammars as theories of linguistic competence as discussed by the authors have been used as a theory of performance for language learning. But they have not yet been applied to the problem of language modeling.
Abstract: : Contents: Methodological preliminaries: Generative grammars as theories of linguistic competence; theory of performance; organization of a generative grammar; justification of grammars; formal and substantive grammars; descriptive and explanatory theories; evaluation procedures; linguistic theory and language learning; generative capacity and its linguistic relevance Categories and relations in syntactic theory: Scope of the base; aspects of deep structure; illustrative fragment of the base component; types of base rules Deep structures and grammatical transformations Residual problems: Boundaries of syntax and semantics; structure of the lexicon

12,225 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, Gass, Susan M., Gass et al. present a new account of language transfer and verify its verifiability, and discuss the role of the mother tongue as a role for the mother language.
Abstract: 1. List of Contributors 2. Preface 3. Introduction (by Gass, Susan M.) 4. A Role for the Mother Tongue (by Corder, S. Pit) 5. A New Account of Language Transfer (by Schachter, Jacquelyn) 6. Verification of Language Transfer (by Ard, Josh) 7. Nonobvious Transfer: On Predicting Epenthesis Errors (by Broselow, Ellen) 8. Language Transfer and the Acquisition of Pronominal Anaphora (by Gundel, Jeanette K.) 9. Transfer and Variability of Rhetorical Redundancy in Apachean English Interlanguage (by Bartelt, H. Guillermo) 10. Discourse Accent in Second Language Performance (by Scarcella, Robin C.) 11. Discourse Functions in Interlanguage Morphology (by Jordens, Peter) 12. Prior Linguistic Knowledge and the Conversation of the Learning Procedure: Grammaticality judgments of Unilingual and Multilingual Learners (by Zobl, Helmut) 13. Language Transfer And Fossilization: The "Multiple Effects Principle" (by Selinker, Larry) 14. Universal Grammar: Is it Just a New Name for Old Problems? 15. Afterword

881 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue the need for an updated and explicit description of language teaching areas generated with reference to a detailed model of communicative competence, which includes discourse competence, linguistic competence, actional competence, sociocultural competence, and strategic competence.
Abstract: This paper argues the need for an updated and explicit description of language teaching areas generated with reference to a detailed model of communicative competence. We describe two existing models of communicative competence and then propose our own pedagogically motivated construct, which includes five components: (1) discourse competence, (2) linguistic competence, (3) actional competence, (4) sociocultural competence, and (5) strategic competence. We discuss these competencies in as much detail as is currently feasible, provide content specifications for each component, and touch on remaining issues and possible future developments.

795 citations