Excuse Me, Am I Too Indirect?

Culture is a vital part of the communication process, and command of socio-cultural rules plays a crucial part in successful communication. This book investigates the pragmatic language behavior of Turkish learners of English in formal complaint situations through the comparison of their speech act performances to those of native speakers. By exploring the learners’ speech production in English, and comparing it to that of native speakers, it explains what linguistic and pragmatic choices they make in their attempts in terms of directness and indirectness. A new data collection tool, “A Discourse Evaluation Task (DET)” is used for the first time and is presented into the literature. The results indicate that native English speakers’ and Turkish learners’ production of complaints reflects a significant difference with respect to the linguistic and pragmatic components. The findings will help teachers and syllabus designers to explain situations in which learners of English may fail pragmatically. More importantly, the results are interesting for the native speakers since they equally need cross-cultural awareness in order to sustain successful intercultural communication.