Teaching the refusal speech act to Japanese students of English : A remedy for cross-cultural communication breakdown between Japanese and Americans

The study of speech acts, which investigates an utterance as a functional unit in communication, has begun to influence greatly the teaching of language use. Numerous speech act studies have been conducted in the past twenty years, and to such studies teachers have been encouraged to give due attention for better instruction. Teaching speech acts not only helps students improve their communicative competence, it also alleviates potential failures in cross-cultural communication. It appears, however, that the majority of Japanese teachers of English (JTE) are still unaware of the significance of teaching speech acts to their students in cross-cultural perspective. This paper chooses 'refusal' as the target speech act, and discusses the importance of teaching the speech act to Japanese students of English.To this end we first review the literature that gives the examples of the cross-cultural communication failure, and then consider the Japanese cultural background that seems to affect Japanese refusal behaviors. We also propose the strategies for refusals that can be incorporated into the current notional-functional syllabus