A comparative study on the use of refusals by Turkish learners of English and native speakers of English in urban and rural areas

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Bursa Uludağ Üniversitesi, SOSYAL BİLİMLER ENSTİTÜSÜ, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2006

Tezin Dili: İngilizce

Öğrenci: Özlem Tekyıldız

Danışman: ZÜBEYDE SİNEM GENÇ

Özet:

This study was carried out in order to investigate the similarities and differences between the use of refusal strategies used by TLE in urban areas, TLE in rural areas, NSE in urban areas and NSE in rural areas. 101 Turkish EFL learners and 50 native speakers of English participated in the present study. In order to gather the necessary information a discourse completion questionaire (DCQ) was administered. The DCQ consists of 9 situations which may require a refusal : three invitations, three requests and three offers. For each of these three groups of situations, the subjects were in interaction with one higher, one equal and one lower status interlocutor. The data were analysed by means of pearson chisquare, correlation and Mann Whitney-U tests. Analysis of the data showed that subjects in all groups used the refusal strategies in a manner similar to one another. All the subjects seem to have similar notions of directness and indirectness in their actions with people from varied social status. In addition, it was observed that the status of interlocutor was an important factor in strategy choice for all respondent groups. It might be wrong to generalize the findings of this study since the limited number of subjects participated in it. That is why this fact should be taken into consideration when the findings are evaluated.