Cross-cultural Comparison of Non-native Speakers' Refusal Strategies in English

Although the number of pragmatics-based studies has increased recently, the comparison of speech act performances of non-native speakers of English is an under-researched area. The present study was conducted to bridge this gap by comparing the refusal responses of Turkish, Polish and Latvian pre-service English teachers in terms of the strategies they used and the appropriateness levels by using a Discourse Completion Test created by the author including 4 refusal eliciting situations. The responses were coded and evaluated. According to the results, it was found out that indirect refusal strategies were more popular than direct strategies for all groups. The most common strategies found for direct and indirect categories are the same for all groups. Evaluation of a native speaker showed that there was no significant difference among the groups in terms of appropriate use of refusal strategies.