The participants in the study were 134 Chinese undergraduates majoring in English in three universities in Taiwan. Among them, 31 were from National Chiao Tung University; 28 from National Taipei University; 75 from National Taipei University of Technology. There were 110 females and 24 males ranging in age from 18 to 25 years old. The participants were all university-level students, who have passed the Joint College Entrance Examination (also called JCEE) in Taiwan. In addition, they as English majors must have taken English courses for at least one year.
With these requirements that an English major must have reached, the participants in this study were at least in a proficiency level of having no difficulty in constructing simple and complete English sentences to express themselves. In doing this, the extremely low-language-level learners who did not have proficient ability to freely convey themselves can be excluded since language proficiency may be an influential factor in exploring pragmatic and sociocultural competence (e.g., Yu, 1999).
INSTRUMENTS
The instrument used to collect data in this thesis was a written questionnaire in the form of Discourse Completion Task (DCT), a popular method of data collection in speech act studies (for reviews of interlanguage methods see Kasper & Dahl, 1991;
Rose & Ono, 1995; Hinkel, 1997). DCT normally consists of a number of situational descriptions, followed by a dialogue initiation with an empty slot for elicitation of the speech act at issue. Although DCT has the drawback of not representing the naturally
occurring speech (Beebe & Cummings, 1996), it is still known for its utility for collecting large amounts of data and for conducting in-depth quantitative analysis.
Henceforth, DCT was adopted as a tool in soliciting Chinese undergraduates’
interlanguage refusals in this study.
The DCT questionnaire in this study was designed to uncover the exploratory results in Chinese learners’ interlanguage refusals in response to requests. It consisted of scripted situations, which represented socially differentiated contexts with different requesting contexts. In order to avoid biasing the participants’ response choices, the word refusal was not used in the descriptions (Beebe & Takahashi, 1989).
The designed situations involved two types of jobs that respectively needed the applicants’ labor and mental contribution. One was labor work that required them to clean classrooms in a school building from seven to ten o’clock every Saturday and Sunday morning during the whole semester. The other one was in want of their mental efforts in reading over two hundred websites on English writing and grammar, for each of which a Chinese introduction as a guide to users needed to be completed.
This job also demanded them to finish at least eight websites per hour. These two jobs were so constructed to appear demanding but reasonable so that the participants could be easily engaged in the imagination of the request-refusal situation. Moreover, these jobs required distinct types of ability that characterized them individually as labor work and brain work. The reason for such design was to ensure that students fond of different part-time jobs would all find either job reasonably to be declined. Examples of Job 1 and Job 2 are illustrated as follows.
Example: Job 1
You are required to clean classrooms in a school building from 7 to 10 every
Saturday and Sunday morning during the whole semester. If you do not want to take this position after knowing its demanding workload, what would you say to the teaching assistant?
TA: Would you like to take this job?
You:
________________________________________________________________
Example: Job 2
You are required to read and write introductions to over 200 English learning websites. Eight websites need to be finished within one hour. If you do not want to take this position after knowing its demanding workload, what would you say to the teaching assistant?
TA: Would you like to take this job?
You:
_________________________________________________________________
It should be noted that the constructed situations need to be intellectually and culturally plausible for the participants so that their responses would not hamper the validity of the results. Considering the suitability of the given context, the depicted situations in the DCT were rather specifically close to the university life. The part-time job recruitment was chosen according to the fact that taking part-time jobs is common to university students, also having been used in previous studies (see Hsieh
& Chen, 2004; 2005a; 2005b) to collect the refusal data from undergraduates in Taiwan universities in their native language, Mandarin Chinese. Results showed that this social context was not unfamiliar to them since they could give proper responses
in Mandarin Chinese tallying with the requested inquiry (for results in Chinese refusals see Hsieh and Chen, 2004; 2005a; 2005b).
In an attempt to investigate learners’ oral rejection, the DCT was composed in its ultimate endeavor to create oral scenarios. To this end, refusal responses were not provided in the form of multiple choices. In the view of some researchers (Rintel &
Mitchell, 1989; Beebe, Takahashi, & Uliss-Weltz, 1990), providing participants potential responses would limit the elicited speech acts and bias the results, though Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford (1993, p.159) indicated that DCT supplying possible hearer responses were better suited to nonnative speakers who were not linguistically and culturally competent in realizing and reacting to the given requests. However, in the case of this study, the data collection would not be stained with the participants’
language competence and with the designed situations due to the selection of English majors from universities as participants and the launch of the previous refusal studies in Chinese (i.e., Hsieh and Chen, 2004; 2005a; 2005b). Blank lines for refusal responses were given after the imaginaand Can you take this job for me?) Inclusion of such prompts was particularly preferable for studies of speech acts that were responses (such as rejections) instead of initiations (such as requests) (Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford, 1993).
Stated as in the beginning of the questionnaire, participants should picture themselves in the action of refusing the requester. In spite of this, still two participants indicated acceptance or the choice of opting out as their response to the described requests, which should be excluded from the refusal analysis and therefore resulted in 266 pieces of response by 134 undergraduates.
PROCEDURES
The Discourse Completion Test was distributed to English majors of three universities. They were undergraduates from the courses of Multimedia English Workshop and Communicative Skills Workshop in National Chaio Tung University;
Second Language Acquisition in National Taipei University; Phonetics and Technical Reading and Writing in National Taipei University of Technology. The researcher first explained how to answer the designed questions, reminding the participants of giving intuitional responses. After the data collection, two inter-raters assisted analyzing the participants’ responses to ascertain the reliability of the coding scheme.