Refusals in Instructional Contexts and Beyond

257 Pages·2013·2.167 MB·Utrecht Studies in Language and Communication

by  Otilia Marti-Arnandiz, Patricia Salazar-Campillo

Refusals in instructional contexts
and beyond
Utrecht Studies in Language and Communication
25
Series Editors
Wolfgang Herrlitz
Paul van den Hoven
Refusals in instructional contexts
and beyond
Edited by
Otilia Martí-Arnándiz and Patricia Salazar-Campillo
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013
Cover photo: www.dreamstime.com
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3715-1
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0971-7
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2013
Printed in The Netherlands
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction
Otilia Martí-Arnándiz and Patricia Salazar-Campillo 1

Section I. Enhancing refusals in formal settings

Using TV series as input source of refusals in
the classroom
Ana B. Fernández-Guerra 5

Refusing in Second Life
Elina Vilar-Beltrán and Sabela Melchor-Couto 23

The effect of instruction on learners’ use and
negotiation of refusals

Eva Alcón-Soler and Josep R. Guzman i Pitarch 41

Effects of metapragmatic instruction on EFL
learners’ production of refusals
Esther Usó-Juan 65

Section II. Variables affecting use of refusals

Refusals in L2 English: Proficiency effects on
appropriateness and fluency
Naoko Taguchi 101

The role of proficiency in the production of refusals
in English in an instructed context
Victòria Codina-Espurz 121

Refusing in L2 Spanish: The effects of the context
of learning during a short-term study abroad program
César Félix-Brasdefer 147

Section III. Investigating learners’ production of refusals

Learners’ production of refusals: Interactive written DCT
versus oral role-play
Alicia Martínez-Flor 175
Research method effects on third language learners’ refusals
Maria-Pilar Safont-Jordà and Laura Portolés-Falomir 213
Production of refusals: Insights from stimulated recall
Patricia Salazar-Campillo 235

Notes on contributors 251
Acknowledgements

First and foremost, we would like to thank all contributors in the volume for
accepting to take part in this project. We are also very grateful to the
anonymous reviewers of preliminary versions of the chapters for their
comments and thoughtful suggestions.

We would like to state that parts of the volume and some studies included in
it have been conducted within the framework of a research project funded by
(a) the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (FFI2008-05241/FILO)
and (b) Fundació Universitat Jaume I and Caixa Castelló-Bancaixa
(P1.1B2011-15).
Introduction1

Otilia Martí-Arnándiz (Universitat Jaume I)
Patricia Salazar-Campillo (Universitat Jaume I)

This volume arises out of the need for empirical investigation on one under-
research issue in speech acts studies, that of refusals. Refusals are inherently
face-threatening acts and require a high level of pragmatic competence so as
not to risk the interlocutor’s face. Moreover, if refusals are produced by non-
native speakers, the possibility of sounding impolite or abrupt is evident due
to their limited pragmatic competence. Taking these insights into
consideration, the present work aims at opening new venues of investigation
on refusals and at contributing to scholarly discussion. Previous volumes on
this speech act have mainly focused on their comparison in different cultures
(for example, Lyuh’s (1992) between Korean and American; Gass and
Houck’s (1999) cross-cultural study of Japanese-English or Félix-Brasdefer’s
(2008) study of refusals in Mexico and the U.S.). However, this book
explores refusals from a more applied perspective, which may have an effect
on pedagogical applications in foreign language instructional contexts.
The present volume includes ten chapters which are divided into three
different parts: the four chapters in Part I focus on ways to enhance refusals
in formal settings; thus contexts such as the English-as-a-foreign language
(EFL) classroom and virtual platforms used for pedagogical purposes are
presented. The three chapters in Part II attempt to shed light on the
production of refusals by examining some variables such as proficiency and
study-abroad programs. Finally, in Part III we find three chapters which
investigate learners’ production of refusals taking into account the impact of
different data collection methods on subsequent analysis of refusals and the
insights from stimulated recall methodology in order to widen the scope and
further our understanding of refusal behavior.
The book opens with Ana B. Fernández-Guerra’s study which compares
refusals in TV series and in naturally occurring discourse taken from
different spoken corpora. Her main aim is to ascertain if the former may
serve as input source of refusals in formal settings. The analysis of the results
demonstrates that refusal behavior is rather similar in both databases, except

1 As members of the LAELA (Lingüística Aplicada a l’Ensenyament de la Llengua Anglesa)
research group at Universitat Jaume I (Castellón, Spain), we would like to acknowledge that this
study is part of a research project funded by (a) the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
(FFI2008-05241/FILO), (b) Fundació Universitat Jaume I and Caixa Castelló-Bancaixa
(P1.1B2011-15).
2 Otilia Martí-Arnándiz and Patricia Salazar-Campillo

for direct and avoidance refusals, which were more frequent in the TV series.
As for adjuncts to mitigate refusals, there is a greater amount in natural
discourse than in the episodes. Taking these findings into account,
Fernández-Guerra considers the use of video in the classroom beneficial as
foreign language learners can be exposed to authentic input which, in turn,
may enhance their pragmatic competence.
The chapter written by Elina Vilar and Sabela Melchor-Couto takes into
consideration the impact of stay-abroad periods on learners’ use of refusal
strategies by two groups of learners of Spanish in the UK: second year (SY)
students who had never been to the target language country and final year
(FY) students who had already spent their compulsory year abroad in Spain.
In the digital era we are immersed in the authors employ the virtual world
Second Life to offer a context for their students’ interaction and production of
refusals. Although both groups obtained similar scores in pre- and post-
refusal strategies, the FY students were shown to be more indirect and used
more negotiation strategies. Moreover, Second Life appears to be an effective
tool to collect data on refusals and to provide students with further digital
literacy.
Taking as a point of departure the under-research discourse level for the
teaching of speech acts, Eva Alcón and Josep R. Guzman’s chapter aims at
checking two hypotheses: 1) whether instruction will make a difference in the
use of refusal strategies an 2) whether instruction will influence learners’
negotiation of such speech acts. The four-step pedagogical proposal for
teaching refusals Alcón suggests consists of first, identifying refusals in
interaction; second, explaining the speech act sets; third, noticing and
understanding refusal sequences and fourth, negotiating learners’ use of
refusals. The study followed a pretest-instruction-posttest design and the
results related to the Hypothesis 1 demonstrate that before instruction,
learners resorted to direct and avoidance strategies. This trend changes
towards a greater use of indirect refusals in the posttest. Alcón’s second
hypothesis is qualitatively analyzed from a discourse perspective which
shows the learners’ attempts to accommodate the non-compliant nature of
refusals over extended negotiations.
In the last chapter of this first part, Esther Usó-Juan addresses the effects of
explicit instruction on refusals. The pedagogical intervention her university
students followed one week after the pre-test was made up of a six-step
sequence (Researching, Reflecting, Receiving, Reasoning, Rehearsing and
Revising). Both in the pre- and the post-test the students carried out a written
DCT as data-collection tool, showing that after the instructional intervention,
a greater and wider variety of refusal strategies were employed. In light of
these findings, Usó-Juan argues that the use of an explicit instructional
framework which includes not only awareness raising but also production
activities may be beneficial for enhancing appropriate use of refusals.