Refusal strategies of Turkish pre-service teachers of English: A focus on gender and status of the interlocutor*

In today’s world, the great demand for using English entails language users to be pragmatically competent so that they could adapt themselves to differing requirements of various contexts. Within those contexts, some factors such as the culture of the target language, the speech act used in the interaction, status and gender of the interlocutors are accepted as essential components. Refusals, one of the most difficult speech acts to perform based on their face threatening nature, were chosen as the main concern of the present study. In an attempt to find out what kind of refusal strategies are employed by Turkish pre-service teachers of English, 27 first year students (14 males and 13 females) at Çukurova University were randomly chosen. Data for the study were collected via a Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) in which the participants were to respond nine scenarios (three lower, three equal and three higher interlocutors). Data analysis concentrated on two main variables: gender of the participants and the status of the interlocutors. In addition to those, refusal combinations utilized by the participants was another focal point of the study. The whole qualitative data were discussed through descriptive statistics and chi-square analyses, and “excuse, reason, explanation” was found to be the most frequent refusal strategy used by the participants. Another important finding is that males were found to prefer directly uttering “no” more frequently than females. It was also found that the number of the strategy combinations increases as the status of the interlocutor rises. © 2019 JLLS and the Authors - Published by JLLS.SED-2017-9083The researchers appreciate the support provided by Çukurova University Scientific Research Projects Coordination Center (Project no: SED-2017-9083)