Türkçe, İngilizce ve Ara Dilde Reddetme

Abstract

Pragmatic competence has been one of the hot topics in cross-cultural research and been studied for many aspects for almost 50 years now. Though, it only started to gain its popularity in language teaching approximately 20 years ago with the development of communication technologies. Nevertheless, it is still an untouched area in teaching Turkish as a foreign language, which is relatively new compared to other languages. This study aims to fill in the gaps of the field by comparing the refusals of Turkish learners to those of English and Turkish native speakers. The data has been obtained via a discourse completion test comprised of 3 scenarios with 2 independent variables, gender and social status. The control groups and the Turkish learners’ refusals were compared in terms of frequency, order and content of semantic formulas. Additionally, the learners’ pragmatic transfer from L1 was investigated. According to the findings, in all scenarios the most preferred refusals were similar in three groups (justification, mitigated refusals, regret, suggesting / requesting an alternative) whilst in some cases (spesifically the frequency and the content of regret, complaints etc.) Turkish learners made a twist from the nativelike use of the target language and consequently pragmatic transfer occured. Also, the status and the gender of the interlocutor played an important role in strategy choice and the length of refusals.