Social Beliefs for the Realization of the Speech Acts of Apology among Jordanian EFL Graduate Students

Abstract

This study is an investigation into the apology strategies adopted by Jordanian EFL (English as a Foreign Language) graduate students in various situational settings. The objective of this study is to highlight the influence of social status and social distance on the choice of apology strategies. Data were collected through Discourse Completion Tasks (DCT) and semi structured interviews. Briefly, the findings revealed that most the students used Illocutionary Force Indicating Device (IFID) and accept responsibility strategies. Other new strategies (arrogance and ignorance, blame something else, swearing) which fall outside the model adopted from Cohen & Olshtain also appeared in the subjects' responses. The newly detected strategies are culture-specific acts that are deeply rooted in the Jordanian society. The findings also showed that the choice of the apology strategy is affected by social status more than social distance.

Apology Strategies in Jordanian Arabic

“…More recently, Banikalef and Marlyna (2013b) investigated the apology strategies adopted by Jordanian EFL (English as a Foreign Language) graduate students in various situational settings. They also aimed to highlight the influence of social status and social distance on the choice of apology strategies.…”

“…Samples of naturally occurring apologies were encoded using a modified version of the apology strategy typology outlined by Olshtain (1989) and Cohen (1996), and then modified by Banikalef and Marlyna (2013b). The modification was made to capture the production of apology among EFL postgraduate Jordanian students.…”

“…Three strategies were added into Olshtain (1989) and Cohen (1996) original framework, namely, arrogance and ignorance, blame something else, and swearing. In line with Banikalef and Marlyna (2013b), the researchers have assigned a code to each strategy. All strategies were coded from A1 to I.…”

“…Both of them are Jordanian native speakers of Arabic and they have significant experience in the analysis of speech acts coding scheme. The researchers provided the raters with the classifications of apology strategies modified by Banikalef and Marlyna (2013b). The raters first worked independently then as a group to match the apology utterances used in the current study in light of the strategies identified by the researchers.…”

A Sociolinguistic Study of Speech Act Realization Patterns in Jordanians’ Facebook Status Updates

“…Thus, the current study observed the socio-pragmatic and cultural values inherent in the speech act of the young Arab Jordanian Facebook users. Most of the relevant research (e.g., Atawneh & Sridhar, 1993;Abdel-Jawad, 2010;Al-Issa, 2003;Banikalef, Maros, Aladdin, & Al-Natour, 2015;Al-Momani 2009;Al-Shboul, Maros, & Mohd Yasin, 2012;Banikalef & Maros, 2013) focus on semantic and syntactic domains without giving attention to the pragmatic skill which is seen as a significant process through the daily life interaction. This is to say that the majority of speech acts studies in Jordanian context attempted to find out the strategies of particular speech act produced by foreign or second language learners compared to native speakers of that language.…”