English Learners. Refusal Strategies Compared

This paper is an attempt to investigate the common and differences of refusal strategies used by Japanese and Chinese learners of English. Speech acts, which are one realization of pragmatic and sociolinguistic competence, are used differently in different cultural backgrounds. During last two decades, rising attention have been paid to comparative cross-cultural pragmatic studies between native speakers and non-native speakers of English. However, with the booming realization of English as an international language, little comparative research has been conducted between non-native English speakers, especially between Japanese and Chinese learners of English.The data of this paper are collected among Forty-eight Japanese and Chinese learners of English by means of Discourse Completion Test, which consists of ten different refusal situations and fall in four categories according to four elicitors, i.e. request, suggestion, offer and invitation. The interlocutors of each category respectively include higher, lower or equal status.In analyzing the data, based on Beebe (1990)'s classification of semantic formula, this study conducted a new version of classification. Based on Brown and Levinson (1987)'s politeness strategies and face threatening act, the strategies used by both learners are analyzed according to their directness, politeness and variedness in semantic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic aspect. Thus, the results are to compare the realization of refusal expressions of different learners of English in different cultural backgrounds, and the feasibility of English as an international language is discussed.