Study on Refusal Strategies and Implication to English Teaching

This study makes an analysis of the refusal strategies of 30 native speakers of English (NS) and 50 Chinese EFL learners (NNS). It implicates that the latter adopts more strategies than the former when making a refusal in general. Both groups adopts more indirect strategies than direct strategies, and the order and frequency of semantic formulas in each situation were different in different situations. So in English teaching, teachers should focus on developing the learners' ability to overcome obstacles in communicative interactions and to become strategically competent.


INTRODUCTION
As we know, the speech act of refusal is a face threatening act in our daily life. According to Brown and Levinson (1978), face is "a public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself" (Brown and Levinson (1978). When we refuse others, the interlocutor's face may be threatened more or less. Besides, fewer studies are made on the speech act of refusal. In order to make up for the vacancy in pragmatics, the following thesis is concerned with the performance of the speech act of refusal, one of the most important pragmatic competences.

II. LITERATURE REVIEW
Several comparative studies have been conducted on refusals, which includes the refusal study conducted in 1985 by Beebe and Gumming, who compared refusals in spontaneous speech and written discourse completion tasks and the follow-up study by Takahashi and Beebe (1987), who investigated written refusals by native speakers of English, native speakers of Japanese, Japanese ESL students in the United States, and Japanese EFL students in Japan.
Then the study by Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss-Weltz (1990) revealed the interaction of status with directness of the refusals. Stevens (1993) studied Arabic and English refusals by using a written DCT, which is similar to those of Beebe et al. (1990) and Hussein (1995)  were asked to fill out the DCT in English.

Method and Procedure of Data Collection
All 80 subjects were asked to fill out the DCT, which was a written role-play questionnaire consisting Also in this study, data were collected from the 80 subjects via responses to the 12-situation discourse questionnaires categorized by Beebe (1990) into the following refusals semantic formulas (see Figure 1which is omitted here).

Data Analysis Methods
As Cohen (1996) notes, one of the first concerns of speech act researchers is to arrive at a set of strategies "typically used by native speakers of the target language".
A strategy is a verbal move such as a statement of regret or a reason that is used as a part of the total act of refusing. In order to arrive at a set of strategies, the utterances are divided into idea units, and then each idea unit was then coded as a specific strategy category.
In analyzing the data, I coded the order of semantic

Results analysis
Firstly, on average, both the NS group and NNS groups used substantially more indirect refusal strategies than direct refusal strategies. Besides, the NNS group used more refusal strategies than did the NS group as reflected inTable1.
Secondly, it is found that both NS and NNS groups primarily use eight indirect strategies with different frequency. The most frequent strategy used by both groups was reasons, however，NNS group used them more than did NS group. Regret strategy is a common one that is frequently used in both NNS and NS. Besides, the NNS group was more like to use the alterative strategy than the NS group. They were more likely to save the threat on the interlocutors ， face by using this strategy when the interlocutors are in. Also for the strategy of off hook, NS consider more of the interlocutor's feelings than the NNS.

Discussion
The Chinese culture is believed to be collectively oriented and the Western individually oriented. The two societies are extremely different and therefore the relationships between social factors and strategy selections in refusal discourse are distinct. In this study, the above study has proved this point.

Collectivism in the Chinese Culture
It is generally accepted that the Chinese culture is group/collectivity oriented, so every member's verbal behavior to certain maxims in certain context because the Chinese care much for the respect of the group and a good moral reputation. Thirdly, if we are to enhance the validity of significant differences, we must increase the number of subjects in each language group, and controls must be instituted in order to study the effects of varying 1.2 proficiency levels,

VII. SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDIES
Based on the limitations of this study, some suggestions are provided for future studies.
(2) Influence of contextual internal and external factors on the strategy use in refusals.
(3) Amount and tone of negotiation involved in refusal.
The DCT is lack of contextual variation, a simplification of complex interactions, and the hypothetical nature of the situations. What people claim they would say in a hypothetical situation is not necessarily what they actually would say in a real situation.
Because the speech act of refusal is complex, the future study will focus on the level of directness in refusals and on the ways in which feelings of obligation and frustration affect their form and content.