FOLLOW-UP RESPONSES TO REFUSALS BY INDONESIAN LEARNERS OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

The study is aimed at investigating strategies of follow-up responses to refusals performed by Indonesians learning English as a foreign language. Having known that his/her desire or want is refused by his/her hearer, a speaker may provide a follow-up response to the refusal to maintain the flow of a talk exchange. This act may also mitigate the tension and is able to prevent the speaker from being considered impolite or non-cooperative. The study involves 20 students of the English Education Department of Indonesia University of Education. The data were collected through Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs). The collected data were then analyzed by using the framework proposed by Searle (1969), Blum-Kulka et al. (1989), and Aziz (2000). It is found that the respondents manifest the follow-up responses in a number of ways, which can be categorized as request, acceptance, apology, promise, refusal, and passive comment. These responses contain some strategies. While the category of request and refusal are manifested in six and two strategies respectively, the categories of acceptance, apology, promise, and passive comment are not further divided into finer categories because they only consist of illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs). This study concludes that an act of providing a follow-up response cannot be separated from the speaker’s attempt to maintain harmony in communication.