Realization of Apology Strategies of EFL Graduate Students: A Case of Two EFL Graduate Students in Indonesia
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Abstract
Communication breakdown could probably occur among interlanguage speakers due to some factors, one of which is the limited knowledge on how to correctly perform the utterances using the target language. This case study involving two graduate students of English was conducted to find out what their apology strategies and to explore how pragmatic transfer might interfere their apology strategies. Using an oral Discourse Completion Task (DCT) and an interview, it was found that both participants opted to use explanations of account when expressing their apology in almost all situations provided. It was also discovered that participants used less varied apology strategies although they have learned English for years. Besides, they tend to intensify their apology expressions to show their sincerity of apologizing combined with the use of some vocative expressions to show the politeness. Furthermore, pragmatic transfer was found to influence their apology expressions both in term of pragmalinguistics which transfer semantic form of Indonesian to English and sociopragmatics transfer which was influenced by the inappropriateness of using general familiarizer.