A Comparative Study of Refusal Strategies Used by Iranians and Australians Masoud Azizi Abarghoui The Faculty of Humanities, the School of Foreign Languages, Islamic Azad University, Shahreza Branch, Iran Email: Masoud_azizi@ymail.com Abstract—This study investigated the differences between Iranian students-Persian speakers who are learning English as a foreign language-(20 male and 20 female) and the native participants (20 male and 20 female) Australian students majoring in different fields, refusal strategies. A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was used to elicit the relevant data. The results showed that Iranian EFL students tend to use limited strategies for refusing their interlocutors' requests. Moreover, refusal patterns of natives are very different from those of non-natives, though they do share some similarities. Index Terms—refusal strategies, Discourse Completion Task (DCT), EFL I. INTRODUCTION It is not strange for us to be in a situation where both the speaker and hearer fail to communicate. The barrier here is cultural awareness. They are from different cultures; thus, they have different frames of understanding. Among many of these terrible situations, refusing tends to cause tension. Refusing is one of the significant issues in intercultural communication. The act of refusing is hazardous and possibly a producer of tension in intercultural interactions. As intercultural exchanges increase, as a result of travel, globalization, and international interactions, the potential for intercultural miscommunication through misinterpreted refusals also grows. It is very important to remember that while native speakers often ignore phonological, syntactic, and lexical errors, they are less likely to overlook pragmatic errors. Such errors are typically interpreted by native speakers as arrogance, intolerance, rudeness, and so forth. Such studies in this regard can shed some light on these aspects of language. This study is worthwhile in that it investigates the influence of interlocutors' social status and gender on the provided refusal strategies. While there are a lot of studies in the literature of refusals that have investigated the effect of interlocutors' social rank on their responses, very few have paid proper attention to the role of the speakers' gender in selecting refusal strategies. Moreover, this study examines Iranian refusal strategies. The findings of this study may help Iranian to get acquaintance with the similarities and differences between Iranian and native English speakers' refusals and discover the cases of positive and negative cross-cultural pragmatic transfer. On the other hand, the cases which are culture-specific should be given more attention and practice. II. REVIEW OF THE RELATED LITERATURE Saying no is difficult for non-native speakers of a language. How one says 'no' is more important in many societies than the answer itself. Therefore, sending and receiving a message of 'no' is a task that needs special skill. The speaker must know when to use the appropriate form and its function depending on his and his interlocutor's cultural-linguistic values. Requests for favors involve doing activities that require some time or effort on the part of the addressee. Reasons, excuses or explanations can be considered as some kinds of attempts to persuade the interlocutor to change his/her mind. A. Speech Acts Refusing is a speech act. In order to actualize their purposes in communication, people seem to perform intended action while talking. Austin (1962) claims that there is a close connection between speech acts and language functions. Accomplishing communicative actions in everyday life requires using necessary words under appropriate circumstances. In other words, when we say something, we are simultaneously accomplishing a communicative action, that is, we are employing words to perform actions in real world context. For example, when we say," Could you please pass the book to me?" we wish to achieve the goal of having the intended addressee help us to obtain the book. Austin's (1962) main contribution to speech act theory is the axiom that by saying something, we actually do something. A speech act is a unit of speaking and performs different functions in communication. Austin (1962) believes that a single speech act actually contains three separate but related speech acts: locutionary acts, illocutionary acts, and perlocutionary acts. Whenever a speaker produces an utterance, they perform a locutionary act. This is simply ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 2, No. 11, pp. 2439-2445, November 2012 © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland. doi:10.4304/tpls.2.11.2439-2445 © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER