When Culture Shapes Refusal: Speech Acts and Politeness in Multicultural Indonesian EFL Classrooms

Abstract

Refusal is a socially consequential act through which speakers negotiate communicative intentions, face, and interpersonal harmony. Despite growing research on interlanguage pragmatics, limited attention has been devoted to how ethnically diverse Indonesian EFL learners realize refusals within a shared university environment. Addressing this gap, this study examined the distribution, combinations, and ethnic variation of refusal and politeness strategies among 113 EFL students representing seven Indonesian ethnic groups in the English Education Study Program at Universitas Lancang Kuning. Using a descriptive quantitative design supported by qualitative exemplification, data were elicited through a Discourse Completion Task adapted from Beebe et al. (1990). Participants’ responses were segmented into semantic formulas and classified as direct refusals, indirect refusals, or adjuncts. Coding reliability was established through validation by three independent linguistics experts. Indirect strategies predominated (67.13%), followed by adjuncts (24.77%), whereas direct refusals were least frequent (8.10%). Statement of Regret was the most prevalent indirect strategy, Gratitude/Appreciation was the leading adjunct, and the recurrent combination of Statement of Regret with Statement of Alternative reflected layered mitigation intended to preserve relational harmony. Although Batak participants demonstrated a comparatively greater tendency toward directness, indirect and mitigated refusals remained dominant across all ethnic groups. These findings indicate that a shared EFL learning environment fosters broadly convergent politeness practices while retaining culturally patterned variation. The study’s originality lies in mapping intranational ethnic diversity within an Indonesian EFL setting, thereby extending intercultural pragmatics beyond cross-national comparisons and supporting explicit, culturally responsive pragmatic instruction in increasingly multicultural English-language classrooms.