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Cross-Sectional Study of Refusal Speech Act Used by Iraqi Undergraduate Students

This paper is conducted to investigate how Iraqi EFL learners refuse different speech acts across different proficiency levels. It aims to examine the most appropriate strategies used by 2nd year students of English as compared to those of 4th year when refusing their interlocutors' invitation, suggestion, and offer. WDCT questionnaire was used to collect data from 40 Iraqi undergraduate students of English: 20 2nd year and 20 4th year. Adopting Beebe et al.'s (1990) theory of refusal, data collected was analyzed quantitatively using statistical analysis. The findings revealed that the 2nd year students of English were more frequent in using direct refusals than their 4th year counterparts. This means the latter were more aware of using refusals politely than the former. On the other hand, the findings showed that 4th year students more frequent in their use of indirect refusal strategies that the 2nd year students. This indicates that the EFL learners of low proficiency level might not bridge the gap between the pragmalinguistic strategies and the grammatical form of the target language. This means that they were not pragmatically competent of the use of the appropriate pragmalinguistic strategies. This implies that the 2nd year students need to pay more attention to pragmatics and use their refusal strategies appropriately. Thus, the paper recommends conducting further research on the use of refusal speech act in Arabic and English.