Intercultural Sensitivity and Refusal Speech Act Awareness

The advancement of studies in pragmatics underscores the undeniable role of cultural awareness in expressing various communication functions like speech acts. Hence, the purpose of the present study revolved around investigating the possible interrelationships between (1) intercultural sensitivity and refusal speech act, (2) intercultural sensitivity and attitudinal appropriateness of semantic formulae among Iranian EFL learners. To meet the purposes, 30 Iranian sophomore students who were majoring in English Literature had undergone an intercultural sensitivity scale (ISS) and a discourse completion test (DCT) respectively. The ISS was devised by Chen and Starosta (2000) to identify the learners’ intercultural sensitivity. It encompassed questions addressing intercultural communication competence. The DCT was a modified version of Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss-Weltz’s (1990) open-ended refusal scenarios to determine the frequency of semantic formulae. It involved tasks addressing refusals to request, invitation, offer, and suggestion in response to interlocutors of lower, equal, and higher social status. Besides, a five-scale confidence test was designed after each scenario to specify the learners’ confidence in the appropriacy of the responses. Correlation coefficient method demonstrated that there existed a positive interrelationship between the ISS and the DCT scores. The results also indicated a positive association between the ISS scores and the confidence test percentages. The findings have important implications for developing intercultural sensitivity as a way which corroborate speech acts awareness

کلیدواژه ها:

Pragmatics ، Refusal speech act ، Culture ، Intercultural competence ، EFL learners