earticle

영어

The purpose of this study is to investigate the speech act of refusal of Korean EFL learners, to classify the refusal strategies used and to assess the appropriateness of the speech act to the particular situations. The study employed 139 Korean university students and divided those subjects into two groups, Advanced group(74 students with TOEIC scores about 800), and Intermediate Group(65 students with TOEIC scores about 400). This study used 10 discourse completion tasks to elicit the subjects’s refusal utterances and 16 kinds of refusal strategies to classify the utterances. Ten judges (5 native English teachers and 5 non-native English teachers) assessed the learners’ performances of 10 refusal situations. The findings are as follows. 1) The refusal strategies used are excuse, apology, non-performative statement, alternative, insult, and philosophical strategies. 2) There is a significant difference between the advanced learners and intermediate learners in the use of refusal strategies. Advanced learners use strategies more frequently than intermediate learners. 3) There is no significant difference among the sociocultural variables in the use of refusal strategies. 4) The overall appropriateness level of Korean EFL learners’ performances of the speech act of refusal is between ‘often inappropriate’ and ‘slightly appropriate’. 5) There is a significant difference in the appropriateness level between the two groups. 6) There is no difference between the two groups of judges, native and non-native English teachers, in the assessment of the subjects’ performances of 10 refusal tasks.