The aim of the paper is to offer an exploration of the apology strategies used by Turkish, Polish and Latvian final year undergraduate students in the ELT department. Moreover, the differences between the apology strategies as well as the appropriateness of the production of apology speech acts used by these three groups of students are discussed. The study has implications for the crucial role of pragmatics in teaching and learning languages in that pragmatic competence is achieved in the context of actual communication.