A STUDY OF THE SPEECH ACT OF REFUSING IN AN EFL SETTING

Abstract

The current study deals with the performance of the speech act of refusing in an EFL setting. This dissertation aims to investigate teachers' use of politeness strategies in refusals in teacher-to-student interaction(s). The questions addressed are: whether teachers use politeness strategies in teacher-student refusals, to what extent do they use these strategies and which type do they implement mostly in different situations: when refusing offers, invitations, requests and suggestions. The data of this research are elicited via a questionnaire that contains a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) distributed to EFL teachers from different Algerian universities. To analyze, describe, explain and discuss the yielded data, the mixed method was adopted. The results reveal that the majority of teachers employed different politeness strategies in making refusals while interacting with their students. Furthermore, the findings of teachers’ DCT display that the most used politeness strategy is the negative politeness strategy. In addition, the findings highlight that the social power and the rank of imposition resulting from the type of the refusal triggering speech act, in addition to the socio-cultural norms and the religious values have an effect on the strategy choice of the refusal.