An Analysis Of Refusal Between Chinese EFL Learners And English Speakers

Refusal has been characterized as both universal and cultural-specific speech act, which can lead to unintended offense and a breakdown in cross-cultural communication. Thus, refusals merit the attention of teachers and learners.Several studies have been conducted from different perspectives on refusal strategies, including cross-cultural investigation, interlanguage pragmatic study and discourse analysis. Inspired by the former researchers, the present author has made some breakthroughs in the following three aspects: 1) the adaptation and modification of the instruments in the research; 2) the introduction of status factors into data analysis; and 3) the application of the results to the EFL teaching and learning. The present paper aims to discover similarities and differences of the refusing strategies between American native speakers of English (NSE) and Chinese English learners (CEL), and to discover differences in sociocultural values between the two cultures. It is a pragmalinguistic investigation on the refusal strategies of the two groups in response to requests, invitations, offers or suggestions.Research subjects fall into two categories: 30 American native speakers of English (NSE) and 30 Chinese EFL learners (CEL). The American native speakers of English are exchange students studying at Shanghai Jiao Tong University now. The Chinese EFL learners are employees who are now working for Electronic Arts Computer Software (Shanghai) Company (EA). The Chinese subjects are selected by means of placement interview in order to make sure that all the Chinese subjects are at the intermediate levels.In this study, the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) employed by Beebe et al. (1990) was used to collect the data. The DCT is a form of questionnaire depicting some natural situations to which the respondents are expected to respond to make refusals. All the subjects of both groups were asked to fill out the DCT in English. The DCT consisted of 12 scenarios designed to elicit refusals for requests, invitations, offers, and suggestions. Each of the scenarios in this questionnaire described a different topic, and each topic took place in a specified context of situation. The questionnaire was designed with the consideration of the interlocutor's social status (higher status, equal status and lower status) when making refusals in different situations.The data, collected from a Discourse Completion Test (DCT), were analyzed in terms of semantic formula sequences and were categorized according to the refusal taxonomy by Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss-Weltz (1990: 55-73).For this study, 30 Chinese learners of English were asked to respond in English to 12 different scenarios in which they would carry out the speech act of refusal. Their English performances were compared to those of English native speakers so as to find out whether the refusal given by the Chinese learners of English correspond more closely with those native speakers of the target language.Results indicate that 1) Refusal speech act uttered by both the Chinese and the Americans bear many similarities because speech act itself is universal which reflects the instinct of the interlocutors; 2) Universal as refusal speech acts are, while using refusal strategies, NSE concerned more about the information communicated, whereas CEL cared more about the communicators; 3) Because the natural tendency for language learners is to fall back on what they know to be appropriate in their first language, the refusals produced by CEL are inevitably influenced by the source language and culture.Due to the lack of linguistic competence of the target language, the CEL feel it hard to achieve language sophistication and strategy variation as the NSE do. Results from this study, along with the crystals of other researchers, will attribute to the design of listening and speaking activities for developing students' ability of communication and the avoidance of cross-cultural miscommunication.