REFUSAL STRATEGIES BY JAVANESE TEACHERS IN BALIKPAPAN

We usually do refusal 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 Javanese teachers in 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. As we know that Javanese groups tend to be indirect, their refusals are confusing and often causes misunderstandings. It is quite hard for the learners of Javanese language to make refusals like native speakers usually do naturally. Therefore, it is a necessary to teach refusal acts to learners of Javanese language. Finally, this study also showed that the participants were more likely to be polite in their way of refusing requests because they are teachers as the role model politeness for students