WHAT MAKES AND BREAKS FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNER COMMUNICATION: AN INTERLANGUAGE STUDY OF COMPLAINTS
Abstract
The research presented in this paper is an interlanguage study of how Macedonian learners of English formulate complaints in the target language and compares their performance with the performance of American native speakers with respect to strategy selection, utterance length and degree of internal and external modification. Additionally, it looks at how native speakers view non-native complaints and what makes non-native complaints sound inappropriate. The analysis of the complaints was performed on the responses of 52 Macedonian learners of English and 48 American native speakers, gathered through a Discourse Completion Task. The results show that although there is some correlation in the way complaints are formulated by the two groups, Macedonian learners show some deviations: some linguistic means are never or barely used; others are used inappropriately or with different force. Besides, Macedonian learners of English don’t have enough pragmatic knowledge to make their utterances efficient. The findings of this research will be used for designing e-learning modules for developing language learners’ pragmatic competence.
Article visualizations:
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Abdolrezapour, Parisa, Azizollah Dabaghi & Zohreh Kassaian. (2012). Iranian EFL learners' realization of complaints in American English. GEMA Online Journal of Language Studies 12(2). 711-724.
Aijmer, Karin. (1996). Conversational routines in English: Convention and creativity. New York: Addison Wesley Longman Limited.
Barron, Anne. (2003). Acquisition in interlanguage pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Baumgarten, Nicole & Juliane House. (2010). I think and I don’t know in English as lingua franca and native English discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 42. 1184–1200.
Beebe, Leslie M., Tomoko Takahashi & Robin Uliss-Weltz. (1990). Pragmatic transfer in ESL refusals. In Robin C. Scarcella, Elaine S. Anderson & Stephen D. Krashen (eds.), On the development of communicative competence in a second language, 55-73. Boston: Heinle and Heinle.
Boxer, Diana. (1993a). Social distance and speech behavior: The case of indirect complaints. Journal of Pragmatics 19. 103-125.
Boxer, Diana. (1993b). Complaining and commiserating. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
Brown, Penelope & Stephen Levinson. (1987). Politeness. Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chafe, Wallace. (1986). Evidentiality in English conversation and academic writing. In Wallace Chafe & Johanna Nichols (eds.), Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology, 261-272. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Chen, Yuan-shan, Chun-yin Doris Chen & Miao-Hsia Chang. (2011). American and Chinese complaints: Strategy use from a cross-cultural perspective. Intercultural Pragmatics 8 (2). 253-275.
Clyne, Michael, Martin Ball & Deborah Neil. (1991). Intercultural communication at work in Australia: Complaints and apologies in turns. Multilingua. 251-273.
Decock, S., & Depraetere, I. (2018). (In)directness and complaints: A reassessment. Journal of Pragmatics 132, 33-46.
Drew, Paul & Traci Walker. (2009). Going too far: Complaining, escalating and disaffiliation. Journal of Pragmatics 41. 2400-2414.
Eslamirasekh, Abbass, Davood Jafari Seresht & Masoumeh Mehregan. (2012). How do you react to the breakdown after it happens? Do you complain about it?: a contrastive study on the complaint behavior in American English and Persian. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 47. 34-40.
Farnia, Maryam, Lyn Buchheit & Shahida Banubinti Salim. (2010). "I need to talk to you" - A contrastive pragmatic study of speech act of complaint in American English and Malaysian. Journal of Language Society and Culture 30. 11-24.
Geluykens, Ronald & Bettina Kraft. (2008). The use(fulness) of corpus research in cross-cultural pragmatics: Complaining in intercultural service encounters. In Jesús Romero-Trillo (ed.), Pragmatics and Corpus Linguistics, 93-117. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH.
Heinemann, Trine. (2009). Participation and exclusion in third party complaints. Journal of Pragmatics 41. 2435-2451.
Holmes, Janet. (1990). Apologies in New Zeland English. Language in Society 19 (2). 155-199.
Hooper, Joan B. (1975). On assertive predicates. In John P. Kimball (ed.), Syntax and Semantics, 91-124. New York: Academic press.
Kakava, Christina. (2002). Opposition in Modern Greek discourse: Cultural and contextual constraints. Journal of Pragmatics 34. 1537–1568.
Kärkkäinen, Elise. (2003). Epistemic stance in English conversation. A description of its interactional functions, with a focus on I think. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.
Kasper, Gabriele. (1989). Variation in interlanguage speech act realization. In Susan Gas, Carolyn Madden, Dennis Preston & Larry Selinker (eds.), Variation in second language acquisition: Discourse and pragmatics, 37-58. Clevedon & Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters.
Kasper, Gabriele & Shoshana Blum-Kulka. (1993). Interlanguage pragmatics. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kecskes, Istvan. (2014). Intercultural pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Koshik, Irene. (2005). Beyond rhetorical questions: Assertive questions in everyday interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Laforest, Marty. (2009). Complaining in front of a witness: Aspects of blaming others for their behaviour in multi-party family interactions. Journal of Pragmatics 41. 2452–2464.
Leech, Geoffrey. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. London: Longman.
Liu, Jianda. (2004). Measuring interlanguage pragmatic knowledge of Chinese EFL learners. PhD dissertation. City University of Hong Kong.
Monzoni, Chiara Maria. (2009). Direct complaints in (Italian) calls to the ambulance: The use of negatively framed questions. Journal of Pragmatics 41. 2466-2478.
Murphy, Beth & Joyce Neu. (1996). My grade's too low: The speech act set of complaining. In Susan M. Gass & Joyce Neu (eds.), Speech Acts Across Cultures. Challenges to communication in a second language, 191-216. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gryter.
Olshtain, Elite & Liora Weinbach. (1987). Complaints: A study of speech act behavior among native and non-native speakers of Hebrew. In Jef Verschueren & Marcella Bertuccelli-Papi (eds.), The pragmatic perspective. Selected papers from the 1985 international pragmatic conference, 195-210. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.
Olshtain, Elite & Liora Weinbach. (1993). Interlanguage features of the speech act of complaining. In Gabriele Kasper & Shoshona Blum-Kulka (eds.), Interlanguage pragmatics, 108-122. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rinnert, Carol, Yoko Nogami & Chiaki Iwai. (2006). Preferred complaint strategies in Japanese and English. Authentic Communication: Proceedings of the 5th Annual JALT Pan-SIG Conference. Shizuoka, Japan: Tokai University College of Marine Science. 32-47.
Roever, Carsten. (2005). Testing ESL pragmatics: Development and validation of a web-based assessment battery. Frankfurt am Main, DEU: Peter Lang AG.
Ruusuvuori, J., & Lindfors, J. W. (2009). Complaining about previous treatment in health care settings. Journal of Pragmatics, 2425-2434.
Scollon, Ron & Suzanne W. Scollon. (2003). Intercultural communication. A discourse approach. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie. (2000). The functions of I think in political discourse. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 10 (1). 41-63.
Traverso, Veronique. (2009). The dilemmas of third-party complaints in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 41. 2385-2399.
Trosborg, Anna. (1995). Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requests, Complaints, and Apologies. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejel.v0i0.2401
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
Copyright © 2015 - 2023. European Journal of English Language Teaching (ISSN 2501-7136) is a registered trademark of Open Access Publishing Group. All rights reserved.
This journal is a serial publication uniquely identified by an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) serial number certificate issued by Romanian National Library (Biblioteca Nationala a Romaniei). All the research works are uniquely identified by a CrossRef DOI digital object identifier supplied by indexing and repository platforms.
All the research works published on this journal are meeting the Open Access Publishing requirements and can be freely accessed, shared, modified, distributed and used in educational, commercial and non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
