Apology Strategies of Taiwanese EFL Male and Female College Freshmen on a Discourse Completion Task

D. Ryan Berg ； Yi-Chen Lu

《應用英語期刊》 10期 (2016/12) Pp. 1-32

摘要

Apologies are an integral part of daily life for both native and nonnative speakers. While an L2 learner may have excellent grammatical and/or lexical skills, they may still commit pragmatic and linguistic errors in speech acts due to not knowing acceptable L1 sociopragmatic and sociolinguistic behavior. This study examines the use of apology speech acts by Taiwanese freshmen English majors at a private university and the use of online data collection versus traditional methods. Paper-andpencil and online discourse completion tasks (DCT) were used to examine the quantitative and qualitative differences in apologies by males and females according to length of apologies and strategies used. Results showed that the subjects used a total of ten strategies, all identified by previous literature. No significant differences were found between males and females in length of apologies, number of strategies used, or types of strategies used. There were also no differences between the paper and online DCT. The results suggest that speech act strategies, like other linguistic skills, begin at the most formulaic levels and may advance in complexity as proficiency increases. They also suggest that online data collection may be a valid tool for speech act elicitation. The results may be useful to EFL teachers who wish to increase their students’ sociopragmatic competence or gather speech act data.

關鍵字

Apologies ； Speech acts ； Sociopragmatic competence ； EFL learners ； Online data collection ； Discourse completion task (DCT)