Research Methodologies in Pragmatics: Eliciting Refusals to Requests
The speech act of refusing, as a dispreferred response, is complex to perform and it usually involves indirect strategies as well as mitigating devices to avoid risking the initiator’s positive face. The appropriate choice of refusal strategies may depend on sociopragmatic issues such as the social...
| Autores: | , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2011 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Sevilla (US) |
| Repositorio: | idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:idus.us.es:11441/34267 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/11441/34267 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Refusals Interlanguage pragmatics Data collection methods Pragmatic production Pragmatic awareness Teaching pragmatics Rechazos Pragmática del interlenguaje Instrumentos de recogida de datos Producción pragmática Consciencia pragmática Enseñanza de la pragmática |
| Sumario: | The speech act of refusing, as a dispreferred response, is complex to perform and it usually involves indirect strategies as well as mitigating devices to avoid risking the initiator’s positive face. The appropriate choice of refusal strategies may depend on sociopragmatic issues such as the social status of the requester relative to the refuser (low, equal, high), social distance between the interactants (stranger, acquaintance, intimate) and the setting. Therefore, learners may require a certain level of pragmatic competence to perform this speech act in an appropriate way. On that account, the aim of the present paper is the elaboration of three different types of instruments (i.e. oral role-plays, written discourse completion tasks and awareness tests) on learners’ production and comprehension of refusals to requestive situations in a foreign language context. These three instruments may serve as both data collection instruments for researchers as well as pedagogical teaching materials for instructors. The paper is organised as follows. First, it reviews the data collection instruments employed in interlanguage pragmatics by particularly specifying the characteristics of oral and written production data, as well as awareness collection data. Then, it explains how the three particular instruments were elaborated. Finally, concluding remarks and pedagogical implications are suggested concerning the use of the proposed instruments in the English as a foreign language learning setting. |
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