A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF REFUSAL SPEECH ACTS USED BY TURKISH EFL LEARNERS AND NATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH
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Abstract
This study aims at comparing the pragmatic competence of Turkish EFL Learners to that of native speakers of English when performing the speech acts of refusals. The study was conducted with 26 Turkish EFL Learners, who were junior year ELT students at Trakya University, and 10 Native Speakers of English. To elicit data, Discourse Completion Task was implemented and obtained data was analyzed with content analysis technique. The frequencies of formulaic refusal expressions applied by Turkish EFL Learners were compared to the ones of native speakers’ of English by means of qualitative methods. The qualitative data gathered from participants revealed that the quality of the refusal strategies uttered by Turkish EFL Learners differed significantly from those made by the native speakers of English. Besides, it is apparent that the quality of linguistic and socio-pragmatic knowledge of Turkish EFL Learners is not native-like as they do not prefer appropriate refusal strategies used by native speakers of English.