أساليب الاعتذار لدى متعلمي اللغة العربية

Abstract EN

Apologizing in L2 has received a great deal of attention in Interlanguage Pragmatics.

However, the majority of previous studies has focused mainly on certain languages such as English, German and Hebrew whilst there are some other languages that have been under-researched, e.g.

Arabic.

Therefore, the present study examines the use of apologies by L2 learners of Arabic, using Discourse Completion Test.

It also looks at the influence of learners' proficiency and degree of imposition upon the production of apologies.

There were 150 participants in this study, further divided into three groups: intermediate, advanced and native speaker.

The results show that the learners' proficiency had a noticeable impact upon the learners' use of apologies.

In other words, learners' production of apologies developed with the increase of proficiency.

As a result, learners in the advanced group approximated Arabic native speakers in terms of the use of apologies.

In addition, the results indicate that there was an effect of the social variable (degree of imposition) on the use of apologies.

Finally, a new apology strategy, namely religious expressions, was used which casts some doubt on the universality of apology strategies identified in the literature.