The speech act of disagreement by Indonesian EFL learners: politeness strategies and appropriateness  

Oleh:

Rianita, Dian ; Nurhayati, Nunung

Jenis: Article from Proceeding
Dalam koleksi: KOLITA 16: Konferensi Linguistik Tahunan Atma Jaya Keenam Belas Tingkat Internasional, page 126-130.
Topik: disagreement; EFL learners; politeness strategy; appropriateness
Fulltext: 126-130 Dian Rianita and Nunung Nurhayati_Edited.pdf (326.59KB)

Isi artikel

Expressing disagreement is quite challenging for EFL learners especially because it may threaten the interlocutor’s face. Some studies reveal that the speech act of disagreement is a dispreferred or undesired response for the previous speaker (Pomerantz 1984, Spencer-Oatey 2000, Cheng & Tsui 2009). Unless disagreement expression is conducted appropriately, the communication breakdown or pragmatic failure possibly happens during the interaction. Therefore, to elicit the speech act of agreement, the speaker should employ politeness strategies accurately that are influenced by power, distance and rank between the communications participants (Brown and Levinson, 1987). This paper explores disagreement strategies elicited by Indonesian EFL learners, and evaluates the appropriateness of those strategies in L2 cultural context. Nineteen EFL undergraduate students took part in this research and filled out the discourse completion tasks (DCTs) concerning with disagreement expressions. The elicited responses were analyzed primarily by using disagreement strategies theories proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) and Muntigl & Turnbull (1998). In order to identify the appropriateness level of the expression, the data were rated by an American native speaker by using the Likert scale. The findings showed that the EFL learners used counterclaims most frequently (47%). It was followed by contradiction (22.8%), contradiction and counterclaim (7.6%), and token agreement (4.09%). Besides, the combination of strategies were also utilized by the respondents such as contradiction and reasoning (4.1%), counterclaim and contradiction (2.9%), token agreement and thanking (1.2%), counterclaim and thanking (2.3%), token agreement and reasoning (0.6%), thanking and token agreement (1.2%), thanking and counterclaim (1.2%), refusal and counterclaim (1.8%), refusal and contradiction (1.7%). It was also found that EFL learners used apology (0.58%), thanking (0.58%) and refusal (1.16%). In relation to the appropriateness level, the results showed that only 6.5% of the responses were considered appropriate. It indicated that most of the EFL learners’ disagreement responses were inappropriate or less appropriate due to the effect of L1 interference

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