The effect of gender on refusal of suggestion in formal and informal situations among Iranian learners

Abstract

The knowledge of the speech acts of refusals has crucial role in our daily communication, because of the interlocutor’s face, politeness, and face threatening act. This study aims to investigate the gender differences in realization of the usage of proper strategies of refusal of suggestion in formal and informal situations.  The participants consisted of 60 (30 females and 30 males) in intermediate level of language proficiency, in Zaban Negar institute of Tehran, Iran as EFL context. The instrument which is used in eliciting the data is Discourse Completion Test (DCT) that is in open ended form and composed of 18 situations that included refusal to a person of acquaintance, intimacy, and stranger among female and male learners. In this study, there are two DCT which are designed separately for female and male groups, and participants should put themselves in each situation and answer the question up to 20 minutes. Data was analyzed due to the frequency types of refusals which are applied to interlocutor's social distance by calculating the frequency statistics and in order to find any significant difference and to compare the differences chi-square was computed. The findings revealed that the frequency of applied refusals of suggestion was different among the learners to people with different levels of social distance. According to chi square analysis, the realization of applied strategies of the refusal of suggestion depends on the different social distances. The frequency of realized and applied strategies in formal and informal situation in refusal of suggestion is not statistically different between the female and male participants.

Keywords: speech acts of refusals, suggestion, gender, formal and informal situation, refusal strategies