Disagreement Strategies among Young Adults in a High School Environment

2. Texas Language Education Research Conference 2017BENEMÉRITA UNIVERSIDAD AUTÓNOMA DE PUEBLA FACULTAD DE LENGUAExploring the disagreement strategies among young native and non-native adults in a high school environment. Laura Rugerio Valerio Jessica Molina Solórzano

3. PURPOSE • The purpose of this study are: • To analyze the disagreement strategies used by Mexican high school students learning in a EFL context, and native speakers according to the degree of power, distance and gender • The impact of social power, distance and gender in formulating disagreements.

4. RESEARCH QUESTIONS • 1. What strategies do non-native speakers use when expressing disagreement? • 2. What strategies do native speakers use when expressing disagreement? • 3. How do social distance, power, and gender affect the way non-native speaker/ native speakers formulate disagreements?

5. LITERATURE REVIEW • Pragmatic competence (Ellis, 2001) • Pragma-linguistics (Leech, 1983) • Socio-pragmatics (Kasper, 2001) • Face (Yule, 1996; Mey, 2001) • Power and Distance (Liu, 2004)

6. LITERATURE REVIEW • Politeness Theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987) • Disagreement act (Bach & Harnish, 1979) • Cooperative Principle Theory (Grice, 1995) • Speech Acts Theory (Yule, 1996)

7. METHODOLOGY • Qualitative Approach • Collecting written production data: Discourse Completion Test (DCT) The DCT involves a written situation followed by a short dialogue with an empty gap that has to be completed by the learner (Houck & Gass, 1996). • Qualitative instrument: • Open-ended questionnaire • 4 situations • English (NS, NNs) and Spanish (NNs) • Distance, gender & power. • Written contributions

8. PARTICIPANTS Group 1: 5 NNs – Spanish Group 2: 5 NNs – English English low-intermediate level Group 3: 5 Ns – English • Age ranged: 15 – 18 • Gender: 8 males and 8 females • Education: High school characteristics

9. RESULTS • To collect naturally occurring spontaneous data in a relatively easy way. • To classify disagreement expressions according to two main categories: strong and mitigated disagreement and identify in which category the participants fall into. • A further understanding of young adults’ expressions on disagreements and how social power, distance and gender might significantly influence their responses in a school context. • The different strategies Ns and NNs produce.

10. LIMITATIONS • The study has only been collected in a particular school setting which narrows down the possibilities to overlook at important information. A written DCT might not have the same authenticity as spoken discourse in real life contexts (Rose, 1994). • This is an exploratory study therefore the results might be different if there were instructed strategies to the English learners group, which can be led to a future research.

11. FUTURE RESEARCH • This study might suggest: • A future comparative research to investigate firstly how the speech act of disagreement is expressed in different languages and secondly to what extent one's practice of disagreement in L1 can have effects on L2 (Angouri & Locher, 2012) . II. An extended research on other factors such as social network, friendship, parental guidance and supervision or perhaps the need for politeness to be embedded as part of a curriculum (TengkuIntanSuzila & MohdYusri, 2012). III. Data should be gather larger sample size merging various methods of data collection such as discourse completion tests and conversation analysis to gain richer data (Rose, 1994).

12. REFERENCES Angouri, J. & Locher, M. (2012). Theorizing disagreement. Journal of Pragmatics, 44(12), 1549-1553. Austin, J (1962). Howto do thingswithwords. Oxford UniversityPress. Brown, P. AND Lewvison. S. (1978) Politeness: someuniversals in languageusage. Cambridge. Cambridge UniversityPress. Blum-Kulka, S & House, J. , & Kasper, G.(1989) Cross-cultural pragmatics: Request and Apologies.Norwiid, NJ Ablex. Creswell, J. (2003). Researchdesign: qualitive, quantitive, and mixedmethodsapproaches. ThousandOaks, Calif, SagePublications. Felix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2006) LinguisticPoliteness in Mexico: Refusalsstrategiesamongspeakers of MexicanSpanish. Journal of Pragmatics 30-(12), 2158. 2187. Ellis, R (1994). Thestudy of secondlanguageacquisition. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress. Kasper-Rose (2001). Pragmatics in LanguageTeaching.USA.CambridgeUniversitypress Levinson, S. (2007). Pragmatics. New York: Cambridge UniversityPress. Hernandez,C. (2010). Comparison and analysis of LinguisticsPatternswhenPerformingRefusals in the L2 by Basic, Intermediate, and AdvancedStudentsfrom LEMO. Flores, E. (2011). ThePragmatics of Request and Apologies: DevelopmentalPatterns of Request and Apologies in MexicanStudents. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Mbaye, A. (2005). ThePragmatics of PublicApologies. LLC ReviewanInterdisciplinaryJournalfortheStudy of Language, Literacy and Culture. 5 (1), pp. 32-39. Mey, J. (2001). Pragmatics. Anintroduction. Malden, Massachusetts.BlackwellPublishers. Rose, K. R. (1994). On the validity of DCTs in non-western context. Applied Linguistics, 15, 1-14. TengkuIntanSuzila T. Sharif, MohdYsuri M. Noor (2012). Politeness: Adolescents in Disagreements. International Journal of Social Science and Humanity, 2 (2), 127-132. Yule, G. (2011). Pragmatics. New York. Oxford University.

13. Appendix A Sexo_____________ Edad_______________ Imagina que estas en las siguientes situaciones. Responde las siguientes preguntas. 1. El profesor de clase asigna equipos para la organización de ofrendas conmemorativas al día de muertos, como consecuencia es necesario organizarse y tomar acuerdos sobre la temática de dicha tarea. Un integrante de tu equipo toma la iniciativa de dividir el trabajo sin consentimiento de los demás ocasionando conflicto pues la carga de trabajo no es equitativa y esto no te parece. Expresa tu desacuerdo. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 2. Al final del primer periodo tu profesora de inglés hace entrega de calificaciones bimestrales. Al recibir tu calificación estás en total desacuerdo ya que a tu criterio no es la calificación que mereces. Imagina que tienes las evidencias suficientes para poder argumentar tu inconformidad. Expresa tu desacuerdo. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 3. Te encuentras en un debate en el salón de clases sobre los estigmas de género en la sociedad actual. Situación: Uno de tus compañeros(as) cuya personalidad es conservadora te dice que el rol de la mujer debe ser exclusivamente del hogar. Expresa tu desacuerdo. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 4. Durante la hora de receso tus amigos y tú se ponen de acuerdo para decidir si irán al cine o simplemente al mismo café de siempre. Uno (a) de tus mejores amigos (as) opina que sería mejor quedarse a comer aun sabiendo que tienes muchas ganas de ir al cine. ¿Cómo le dices que te interesa más ver una película? ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

14. Appendix B •  Gender________________ Age_______________________ • Instructions. Answer the following questions. Picture yourself in the situation. • You are in class and have been asked to work in teams, but one of the members of your team has already taken the liberty to assign tasks without considering the whole team. How do you express your disagreement? • ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ • 2. Your teacher is giving final grades for the first period of the year. A soon as she tells you your note, you know there’s has to be a mistake. So how do you tell her she is probably mistaken? • ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ • 3. You are in the middle of a debate in the classroom, the situation is turning hot since one of your classmates comes with the idea that women should stay home. How do you tell her/him you think the opposite? • ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ • 4. You are in the break at school trying to decide whether you and your friends are going to the movies or just hang out at the lunch place across the street. One of your best friends suggest to stay and relax, but of course you have been looking forward to going to the movies all week. How do you tell him/her you disagree with him/her? • ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________