Interlanguage Pragmatics of Refusal Strategies among EFL University Students

This paper investigates the language forms of refusals produced by two groups of English as a Foreign Language students: native Turkish speakers and native Macedonian speakers. Refusals are complex speech acts that have a large impact on the communication between EFL speakers. These acts can threaten interpersonal relationships and require the ability to use a range of pragmatic strategies to maintain politeness and social harmony. The analyzed data were gathered through an online discourse completion task that included multiple situations with various contexts and different social relations between the interlocutors. The participants of the study are specifically first-year university students who are learning English as a foreign language. The responses are analyzed following the framework of Beebe, L.M., Takahashi, T., & Uliss-Weltz, R. (1990). The main aim of the paper is to explore the pragmatic strategies used to convey refusals and to examine the role of social variables in shaping refusals. The initial findings show slight shifts in the refusal forms and strategies used due to shifts in social factors. The research highlights the complexity of refusals as communicative acts and contributes to the field of interlanguage pragmatics by offering insights into how cultural background and contextual factors shape refusal behavior among EFL learners.