The Use of Apology Strategies in English

In view of the recent shifts from grammatical to communicative competence and pragmatic ability in language teaching and learning, it is not surprising that speech act of apologizing and cross-cultural comparisons of apologies and apology strategies in different languages have been popular among researchers within the field of sociolinguistics, especially pragmatics. Starting with Hymes’ (1974) original idea that learners of a language have to have more than grammatical competence in order to be able to communicate effectively in a language, there has been great emphasis that learners must acquire not only linguistic rules such as morphology, syntax, phonology, and vocabulary, but they must also acquire sociolinguistics rules of the target language (Anderson, 1990; Olshtain & Cohen, 1983; Wolfson, 1981).