Use of Refusal Strategies among Kurdish EFL Students Learning English Language: A Case Study of Soran University EFL Students

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Refusal strategies occur in every language. The speech act of refusals has been tackled by many researchers. The aim of this study was to explore pragma-linguistic strategies employed by a group of Kurdish English language learners when making refusals to invitations, requests, offers and suggestions. The study has made use of a modified written discourse completion test (DCT) comprising of some different situations. The participants are required to provide written data to express their refusals to these situations. . There were 36 participants (18 males, 18 females), and their age ranged between (19-25). They were asked to respond to eight different situations of refusing. The results show that participants differed pragmatically in the way they made use of refusal strategies. Some of the participants prefer direct refusal, while some others use indirect speech act refusals. The findings indicate that Kurdish learners of English language tend to use more expressions of regret followed by excuses/ reasons/ explanations. Most often, they have avoided refusal with “no” except in few cases where it is, also, followed by excuses or explanations, with the exceptions of some differences and variances.