“Communication is a two-way street”: Instructors’ perceptions of student apologies

Dongmei Cheng

Abstract

Speech act studies are increasingly likely to use retrospective verbal protocols to record the thoughts of participants who produced targeted speech acts (e.g., Cohen & Olshtain, 1993). However, although communication is always a two-way street, little is known about the recipients’ perceptions of speech acts. In academic communication at universities, it is critical for students to gain awareness of the socio-cultural norms as well as knowledge of appropriate linguistic forms in interacting with instructors. Therefore, gathering perceptual information from instructors, the recipients of many speech acts such as apologies, serves an important role in realizing successful student-instructor communication. Targeting instructors’ perceptions, two forms of an online survey were created via surveygizmo.com, with one including 12 spoken apologies and the other including 12 emailed apologies. An equal number of native (NS) and nonnative English speaking (NNS) students produced these apologies. The 150 instructors who responded to the survey gave significantly higher ratings to apologies made by NS students than to those made by NNS students. An analysis of instructors’ explanations after the ratings showed that both sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic knowledge (Thomas, 1983) were valued in the successful realization of apologies, with the majority of instructor explanations addressing the sociopragmatic aspects of apology productions. In their comments on highly-rated student apologies, instructors appreciated the fact that students took responsibility in apologizing, offered worthy explanations, and delivered the messages with minimum grammatical mistakes. Poorly rated apology messages did not contain sufficient or valid evidence, inconvenienced the instructors through inappropriate requests, and usually had multiple grammatical mistakes. This study provides useful source of information to be used in university classrooms that can orientate novice learners towards socio-cultural expectations and appropriate lexical markers to be employed in making successful apologies in academic settings.

Keywords:
Quick links
A browser-friendly version of this article is not yet available. View PDF
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson
1978Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cheng, Dongmei
2013“Student-instructor Apologies: How are they Produced and Perceived?” Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ.Google Scholar
Cohen, Andrew D., and Elite Olshtain
1993“The Production of Speech Acts by EFL Learners.” TESOL Quarterly 27: 33–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Economidou-Kogetsidis, Maria
2011“‘Please answer me as soon as possible’: Pragmatic Failure in Non-Native Speakers’ E-email Requests to Faculty.” Journal of Pragmatics 43: 3193–3215. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Engel, Bevely
2001The Power of Apology. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Eslami, Zohreh R., and Abbass Eslami-Rasekh
2008“Enhancing the Pragmatic Competence of Non-Native English-Speaking Teacher Candidates (NNSTCs) in an EFL Context.” In Investigating Pragmatics in Foreign Language Learning, Teaching and Testing., ed. by E.A. Soler, and A. Martínez-Flor, 178–197. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Evetts, Julia
2003“The Sociological Analysis of Professionalism: Occupational Change in the Modern World.” International Sociology 18: 395–415. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Félix-Brasdefer, J. César
2008“Perceptions of Refusals to Invitations: Exploring the Minds of Foreign Language Learners.” Language Awareness 17: 195–211. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ishihara, Noriko
2009“Teacher-based Assessment for Foreign Language Learners.” TESOL Quarterly 43: 445–470. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010“Assessing Learners’ Pragmatic Ability in the Classroom.” In Pragmatics: Teaching Speech Acts, ed. by D.H. Tatsuki, and N.R. Houck, 209–227. Alexandria, Virginia: TESOL.Google Scholar
Littlemore, Jeannette
2003“The Communicative Effectiveness of Different Types of Communication Strategy.” System 31: 331–347. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McKay, Sandra Lee
2006Researching Second Language Classrooms. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Swart, William, Steve Duncan, and Rosina Chia
2009Professionalism and Work Ethic among U.S. and Asian University Students in a Global Classroom: A Multi-cultural Comparison. International Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics 7: 36–40.Google Scholar
Taguchi, Naoko
2003Pragmatic Performance in Comprehension and Production of English as a Second Language. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ.Google Scholar
2011“Rater Variation in the Assessment of Speech Acts.” Pragmatics 21 (3): 453–471. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tateyama, Yumiko
2001Explicit and implicit teaching of pragmatic routines: Japanese sumimasen. In Pragmatics in Language Teaching, ed. By K.R. Rose, and G. Kasper, 200–222. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Jenny
1983“Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failure.” Applied Linguistics 4: 91–112. DOI logoGoogle Scholar