The Speech Act of Apology for Saudi EFL Students

Abstract

This research will find out the nonverbal communication tools used by the students with Arabic background which they use while talking in English to their counter parts. The research will use the techniques designed by Cohen, Olshtain & Rosenstein (1986) commonly known as Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and the Apology Introspection Questionnaire (AIQ), which was first introduced by Ismail (1998). The research was conducted on various techniques used by the students to apologize when they were alone or when they were in groups. The aim of this research was to investigate the effectiveness of English teaching techniques used by the student whose mother tongue was Arabic. This research was particularly focused to find out the apology technique learned by such students. There are issues in speech acts (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1984;Cohen, et al., 1986) which are an integral part of the culture and these cultural aspects ultimately result in misleading differences in the way student convey their thoughts and apologies in English. The language skills were tested along with discourse completion test (DCT) and the apology introspection questionnaire (AIQ), this was accompanied by the type of misconduct, relationship of two parties and the way apology was offered. The findings in this respect revealed that the direct apology was effectively used in Arabic and English languages. However, there were some situations where indirect apologies were found effective in both languages as well as a mix of direct and indirect apologies was also used. The study proved that grammar, syntax, and spelling were not the only tools to articulate an apology.

“Wallah! I Beg Your Pardon...”: A Cross-cultural Study of Apology Speech Acts

“…When respondents combined strategies, the most frequently used component was an illocutionary force-indicated device, suggesting that it is a compulsory component of apologetic formulae. Such a conclusion is supported by studies indicating the universality of apology, such Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984) and Almegren (2018).…”

“…Recent studies have modified this conceptualization (Ogiermann 2009, Aydin 2012, Almegren 2018). Ogiermann extends the original approach to include more realization patterns, following semantic formulae she generates by eliciting responses to offensive situations from three languages: English, Polish and Russian.…”

“…The production and interpretation of these expressions are vital for effective communication (Schauer 2019). Yet, apology speech acts and L1 influence on foreign language acquisition remain under-researched, especially in the context of Saudi Arabia (Alsulayyi 2016, Almegren 2018. The present study selects a number of apologetic situations to examine linguistic and cultural differences between English and Saudi apology speech acts, along with how the differences may influence EFL learners.…”

Gender and Age Differences in Using Apology Strategies in Saudi Arabia

“…It would be valuable to uncover apology strategies that larger groups of people from other Saudi regions utilize; this is the goal of this paper. Almegren (2018) and Alsulayyi (2016) investigated the strategies of apology that EFL students and teachers used. Almegren (2018) investigated the strategies of apology that male Saudi students (ages 20-25) commonly used.…”

Comparison of How Arabic and English Foreign Language Learners Compliment and Respond to Praises

“…Al- Kayed and Al-Ghoweri (2019) covered speech acts of criticism among Jordanian Arabic speakers, and Chikhi and Chebli (2021) conducted a similar investigation but with Algerian Arabic speakers. Other kinds of speech acts between Arabic and English have also been explored by many researchers within the past five years; Almegren (2018) focused on Saudi EFL students' speech acts of apologising, Al-Ghamdi and Alrefaee (2020) compared Yemeni EFL speakers with American English native speakers' speech acts of refusal, Hosni (2020) analysed the Egyptian Arabic native speakers and American English native speakers' speech acts of advising, and Alghazo et al (2021) addressed Jordanian Arabic natives' speech acts of congratulating.…”