1.0 Introduction
Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), a university in Malaysia has its own code and regulation on how the students should behave inside the campus such as how they should have stickers on their cars in order to park their cars in the campus, how they should dress and how they should be punctual in attending the classes. If the students are found breaking and violating the rules of the university, they will be given a letter as the first warning that reminds them to not repeat the wrongdoings again and if they are found committing the same wrongdoings again, they will be fined. In this kind of situations, people can see and observe how the students apologise to the guard or the authority who give them the warning letter and how different apology strategies are used by male and female students.
According to Holmes (1995), an apology is a speech act that is intended to remedy the offence that the apologizer takes responsibility and, as a result, to repair social relations between interlocutors. Olshtain and Cohen (1983) recognize apology as a social event when they point out that it is performed when social norms are violated. Bergman and Kasper (1993) agree and stress the view as they see that the purpose of the apology is to reinstate social relational agreement after the offence is committed and often takes in the form of phrases such as ‘I’m sorry’, ‘I apologize’ and ‘pardon me’. Sometimes the speaker openly apologizes to the other person for the offence he or she did whereas sometimes he or she admits his or her fault and reflects himself or herself and be responsible for the mishap. Moreover, they also show their determination to be careful in future.
There are different methods to measure these apology strategies. These methods mostly depend upon the speaker, the addressee or both. Individuals performed apologising speech acts when they have done any mistake or nonsense to others who may have different kinds of relations with them ranging from most formal to most informal. Thus apologies may differ ranging from the most highly apologetic to the least apologetic depending upon the interlocutor. Moreover, they also differ in the intensity and type of mistake or mishap. Different frameworks have been proposed especially by the western linguists for measuring and calculating apologies. These frameworks place apologies in different categories (Majeed & Janjua, 2014).
1.1 Statement of problem
In Malaysia, it is very important for a person to apologise to another person for any offence, mistakes or fault that he or she had done. It is part of the culture and actually originated from the Asian culture that takes the act of apologising very seriously. However, there are some people that have a high ego that make them so self- absorbed and difficult to apologise to other people even though it is obvious that they had done mistakes to the other people. Therefore it is very important for people to know the consequences of apologising to other people and how big difference it can bring to the relationship between people. In order to do that, people first need to know about the different types of apology and what each type of apology means and its purpose (Parsa, 2012).
Although extensive research have been conducted on how male and female used language to express apology in Asian countries such as Chamani’s (2014) ‘Apology strategies employed by Saudi EFL teachers’ and Alsulayyi’s (2016) ‘Gender differences in the use of apology speech act in Persian’ which investigate the apology strategies used in the Arabic and Persian language respectively, little is known about how Malaysian male and female students use apology strategies for specifically three types of apology in the Malaysian contexts . Even less is known about specifically the effect of social distance on the difference between the apology strategies used by the two genders for the three types of apology (Chamani, 2014).
It can be seen that those past studies only focus on Asian countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran but not specifically on southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia and they also focus generally on all types of apology but not specifically on three types of apology such as apology when regretting something (IFID), apology when accepting the blame and apology when promising for forbearance. They also focused on other factors such as gender, social distance, power, social status, social dispositions and situation but did not focus specifically on the social distance factor (Majeed & Janjua, 2014). Therefore, the present study will focus on apology strategies used by Malaysian male and female students on the three types of apology which are apology when regretting something (IFID), apology when accepting the blame and apology when promising for forbearance and also the social distance that affect the difference in which that whether they often apologize to someone that is more close to them or less close to them.
1.2 Aim of the study:
The aim of the study is to examine what are the apology strategies used by UTAR male and female students for three types of apology which are apology when regretting something (IFID); apology when accepting the blame and apology when promising for forbearance. The current study also aims to discover how social distance affects the difference between them.
1.3 Research objectives:
This study is conducted to achieve these objectives:
1. To discover how male and female UTAR students use the three types of apology strategies in Malaysian contexts.
2. To discover which apology strategy most used by the students.
3. To determine how social distance affect the difference of the use of apology strategies.
1.4 Research questions:
RQ1: Which apology strategies do male and female UTAR students use?
RQ2: Which apology strategy is the most used by the students?
RQ3: To what extent does social distance affects the difference of the language used in the three types of apology?
1.5 Significance of the study
The study is worth doing because it will reveal and give new insights and understandings to people on the difference of apology strategies used by male and female. The people that will benefit from this study are professionals and other practitioners such as linguists that study how human use language to apologise and the behaviours that can be associated to apology strategies used. The current study will also benefit the psychologists and counsellors because this study will reveal and give them new insights and understanding about male and female behaviour in apologising and they can make new strategies and steps. They will also know and understand more about the effect of social distance and familiarity between the people who apologise and the people who receive apology and thus can invent new ideas and conduct new strategies on how to make people apologise for the right reasons because apologising can solve problems and can repair broken relationships.
1.6 Definition of terms
1.6.1 Illocutionary Force Indicating Device (IFID): is an apology strategy used when someone expressing regret explicitly through uttering expressions, such as “I’m sorry”, “excuse me”, “forgive me”, “I regret” that shows the speakers need to gain forgiveness for their actions (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1984).
1.6.2 Apology when taking the blame (responsibility) (TOR): In this type of apology, the apologizers strive to make up for their fault by taking verbal and non-verbal actions. This strategy can be classified into three sub-categories: expressions of self-blame, expressions of lack of intent and expressions of admission of fact (Cohen & Olshtain, 1981). E.g: “It was my fault.”
1.6.3 Apology when promising for forbearance (FOR): Promise of forbearance is when an apologizer can promise either never to perform the offence in question again in the future or to change or improve his behaviour. It is often uttered by using performative verb promise (Trosborg, 1987). E.g: “I apologize, this won’t happen again”.
1.6.4 Social distance: The closeness of the relationship of a person has with other people around him or her such as family members, friends and strangers (Chamani, 2014).
1.7 Scope of the study
This study will cover on the apology strategies used in three types of apology which are apology when regretting something (IFID), apology when accepting the blame (responsibility) and apology when promising for forbearance (promise not to do something again). The sample of the study will be 50 UTAR students which are 25 male students and 25 female students. Next, the method that will be used is questionnaires. It will also discover the effect of social distance on the usage of language in the three types of apology.
1.8 Limitations of the study
The sample of the study which is only 50 UTAR male and female students cannot represent all of the university students in Malaysia. Apart from that, the result of the study cannot be generalized for a whole bigger number of public and people. The study will only cover on three types of apology and the effect of social distance. There will be no interviews and quantitative methods used which can give deeper understanding and insights to people thus there might be other additional information that people won’t know and get from this study.
1.9 Conclusion
In this chapter, the researcher included the introduction, statement of problem, aim of the study, research objectives, research questions, significance of the study, definition of terms, scope of the study and limitations of the study. The next chapter which is chapter two includes the literature review of the past studies related to the apology strategies and the variables involved such as gender and social distance.
Chapter 2: Literature Review
2.0 Introduction
In this chapter, the researcher will review past studies that conducted studies and research on apology strategies used by teachers and students from Asian and European countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, England and Greece. It will review about the apologies strategies used, the relationship between apology strategies and gender, the effect of social distance on the types of apology and gender, methods used in the past studies and the comparison between the past studies and the present studies.
2.1 Apology strategies
Most of the past studies found were doing research on the apology strategies and speech act used for several numbers of types of apology. For example, Alsulayyi (2016), in his study, included apology types and strategies such as Illocutionary Force Indicating Device (IFID) and upgrader apology strategies which refer to words or expressions which have more degree of power to the apologetic expressions, such as “very, so, terribly etc.”. he also included the taking on responsibility apology strategy where the apologizer strives to make up for his or her fault through taking verbal and non-verbal actions and there was also downgrading responsibility or the severity of the offence in which the speaker attempts to reduce his/her responsibility for the offence. Apologizers can express their apology via various strategies, e.g., excuse, claiming ignorance, justification, reducing the severity of the offence, and denial. Other strategies are offers of repair where someone offers to repair the damage brought about by his or her offence and verbal redress in which the offender shows concern for the offendee. There were other past studies that include these types of apology strategies in them.
On the other hand, apart from these apology strategies, Chamani (2014) included the strategies when someone rejects to apologize to the other person in her studies. She included the strategies such as the denial of the need to apologize (e.g: “There was no need for you to get insulted”), the denial of responsibility such as not accepting the blame (e.g.: “it wasn’t my fault.”) and blaming the other participant (e.g.: “it’s your own fault.”). There were also other past studies that include these kinds of rejecting expressions to apologise.
Next, Parsa (2012) in his study, investigated the non-apology strategies most used and employed by Iranian ESL students in the University of Malaya. This means that the non-apology strategy that was chosen by the students was used when the apologizer tries to evade or avoid necessity of apologizing to the victim. He found out that apologies that offend the victim were not used by any respondents because the Persian culture highly respect and value people’s feeling, face and belongings and all human beings are viewed as different parts of the same body.
From these past studies, they found that Illocutionary Force Indicating Device (IFID) apology strategy was the most used apology strategy by the participants compared to the other types of apology strategies because of it simple and less sensitive nature of expressions (Alsulayyi, 2016).
2.2 Apology and gender
According to Holmes (1995), men and women use apology for different functions. According to her, women use apology to express solidarity while men view the act of apology as the sign of admissions of weakness, inadequacy or failure. In her data, men offered apology to women higher in number compared to women apology to men because men viewed women as subordinate from them in social status so they did not feel so reduced in status when they have to perform the act of apology to women
In relation to gender, Turiman, Leong and Hassan (2013) included a total of 120 of ESL learners that comprise of 60 male and 60 female university students from Malaysia. They found that women tend to apologize more than men in their study. There were also differences in the order of primary strategies used by the male and female students. They also stated that there is a difference in the frequencies and the type of apology strategies used when the respondents apologized to their own gender compared to the opposite.
Apart from using university students as the participants, there were past studies that used EFL teachers as the participants, for example in Alsulayyi (2016) study, he used Saudi Arabian EFL male and female teachers as the participants. They found that gender has a great impact on the use of apology strategies in various ways. For example, they found that the males participants used IFID strategy and the upgrader strategy more than the female participants, whereas females participants used the downgrading responsibility (DR) strategy more than the male participants. IFID strategy has the highest percentage compared to the other apology strategies and was the most adopted apology strategy used by both Saudi male and female respondents. Among Saudi respondents, the effect of gender on using the upgrader strategy was very obvious; there was a significant difference between Saudi males and females.
Next, Chamani (2014) conducted research on the effect of gender differences on the use of apology speech act in the Persian language. She found that when men apologised to women, they provide more explanations that women because people need to have stronger cognitive abilities in order to provide more explanations and men seemed to have the abilities. It was also probably because men feel more responsible to convince their hearers that they did not actually want to offend the hearers. She also found out that men used the promise of forbearance strategy more than women because men have higher status in the Iranian society thus it is easier for them to make and fulfil their promise. They also used the strategy because they want to maintain their relationships with people especially with women.
It can be seen from these past studies, gender is one of the most important factors other than social factors such as social dominance, social distance and social status. (Chamani, 2014).
2.3 Social distance
In her study, Chamani (2014) included social distance as one of the variables. Other variables were social status, age and gender. There were significant differences between males and females in the use of apologies with intimates, friends, and strangers revealed in the analysis of the study. She found that both males and females most frequently apologized to strangers. Yet, compared to females, males apologized to strangers more frequently. In contrast, it was found that females apologized to their female friends and intimates more than males. The results also revealed that the highest frequency apologies occurred in the interaction between male strangers, but the lowest frequency occurred when males apologized between their male friends. There was a significant difference found in the frequency of apologies received by males and females with different degrees of distance between them. From this study, it can be seen both genders apologized to strangers the most and they apologized to their friends the least. Male strangers are being apologized for more than female strangers. Yet, female intimates and friends apologise more between each other than male intimates apologise to their friends.
Majeed and Janjua (2014) included social distance as one of the variables where they chose participants that have different relations with each other from more formal to more informal. They found that the participants used an offer of repair (REPR) apology strategy in some interactions with siblings and close friends to a considerable extent. They used REPR with siblings and friends because they did not have any feelings of formality with them. It is also because they did not any have threat or fear from the other person that they used REPR but also to negotiate the relations with their intimate partners. So this suggested that social factors also control the use of apology strategies.
Bella (2014), in her study, chose native speakers of Greek from Athens and English learners that had just arrived in Athens that was going to study Greek as the participants. She found that Greek native speakers, especially in the familiarity of situations tend to resort to a far greater number and a variety of positive apology strategies. In contrast, the English learners were found to transferred negative apology strategies from their L1, but they heavily underused the positive apology strategies that were dominant in the Greek native speakers' data. Interestingly, especially in relation to the familiarity of the relationship in the situations, was not what the English learners actually do, but what they don't do, when compared to the Greek native speakers. It was shown that Greek native speakers perceived their relationship with friends as less distant than the English learners. It was also shown that several solidarity building strategies, such as humour and self-depreciation were being used in the familiarity situations by the native speakers of Greek.
2.4 Methods used
In relation to the methodology used, most of the past studies used the qualitative methods more than the quantitative methods. For qualitative methods, most of the past studies adopted the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) that originated from Cohen and Olshtein’s (1981) that is frequently used by researchers in the study of apology strategies. Saleem, Azam and Saleem (2014) applied DCT, having 15 apology scenarios that were developed to collect information from the Pakistani English students on their use of apology strategies in English. The DCT consisted of two parts which are Part A: Demographic Information where the participants were asked about their demographic information such as, name of institution, discipline and semester, gender, student status, and level of English and Part B: Apology Scenarios which consisted of fifteen apology situations that were modified from those situations used in the previous apology speech act studies of Olshtain and Cohen, (1983), designed to elicit apology strategies (the type of words/expressions).
Muthusamy and Farashaiyan (2016) used Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT) that was previously pilot tested by Liu (2005) as the main elicitation instrument of their study. They designed WDCT to elicit requests and apologies from participants in verbal communication in the English language. There were 4225 expressions of request and apologies and 2700 mitigating devices that made a total of 6925 expressions that were successfully collected, coded and analysed by means of the WDCT. The WDCT consisted of two parts which were; the first part comprised 11 social situations (1-11) to prompt requests and the second part, 9 situations for apology (12-20). They also used the interview as one of the qualitative methods to collect the data. The interview was designed as semi-structured interviews that were conducted in relation to the students’ production of the speech acts. The aim of the interviews was to gain some qualitative insights into the participants’ views, beliefs and opinions concerning the issues of requests and apologies in a second language.
Another quantitative method that was used is observation. Chamani (2014) collected the data for her study that came from a corpus of 500 apology exchanges collected by using the ethnographic method of observation. She adopted this method from Manes and Wolfson (1981) as well as Holmes (1990) that used this method in their studies on apology speech act. Two assistants were asked to write down the apologies in everyday situations to collect the corpus. The places where the situations occurred were including home, workplace, university, shop, street, outdoors, and even on the bus or taxi during a period of more than one year in some forms prepared in advanced for the observation.
In relation to quantitative data, Alsulayyi (2017) conducted a quantitative descriptive research study with DCT for the data collection. There were three categories of variables (binary, nominal and ordinal) investigated in his study. The binary variables referred to male and female while the nominal category referred to the Arabic and English languages. The ordinal variables referred to the most frequent apology strategies used by the respondents. He also employed quantitative descriptive statistics (i.e. frequency analysis and percentages) to analyze the data, answer the research questions and show which types of apology strategies that are frequently used by the respondents.
2.5 Comparison between past studies and present study
It can be seen that these past studies, despite only one past study focused on European country such as Greece, most of the past studies only focused on Asian countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran but not specifically on southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia and, although one past study had been done on Malaysians, they all focused generally on all types of apology but not specifically on three types of apology such as apology when regretting something (IFID), apology when accepting the blame and apology and promise for forbearance. They also focused on other factors such as gender, social distance, power, social status, social dispositions and situation but did not focus specifically on the social distance factor (Majeed & Janjua, 2014).
Therefore, the present study will focus on apology strategies used by Malaysian male and female students on the three types of apology which are apology when regretting something (IFID), apology when accepting the blame and apology when promising for forbearance and also the social distance that affect the difference in which that whether they often apologize to someone that is more close to them or less close to them. This study will adapt the qualitative method of the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) that originated from Cohen and Olshtein’s (1981) that is frequently used by researchers in the study of apology strategies.
2.6 Conclusion
In this chapter, the researcher showed the reader the literature reviews of the past studies that are related to the apology strategies and the variables related to them such as gender and social distance. The sections of this chapter includes the introduction, apology strategies, apology and gender, social distance, method used and the comparison between past studies and present study. The next chapter which is chapter three includes the methodology and procedures that will be executed and done in this study.
Chapter 3: Methodology
3.0 Introduction
In this section, the researcher will explain the methods that are going to be used and adopted in ensuring the productive and reliable result of this research. It will explain the research design, instrument, sampling, data collection procedure and data analysis procedure of the present study.
3.1 Research design
The present study will employ the qualitative method approach by using close- ended questionnaires. According to Fryer (1991) qualitative method is often associated with the collection and analysis of written or spoken texts. Qualitative procedures were previously employed to investigate apology strategies (Olshtain & Cohen, 1983) through the use of Discourse Completion Tests (DCT). Adapted from the works of the researchers aforementioned, the present study will utilize the qualitative design in order to discover the differences of the respondents’ realization of apology when apologizing to the same and opposite gender with the social distance factor being attached to them. The close- ended questionnaire consists of five categories with two situations for each category that an individual may face with in real life. So there will be ten questions in total and under each question, there are three columns of answers provided to be chosen by participants (Turiman, Leong & Hassan, 2013).
3.2 Instrumentation
The instrument that will be used in this study is the Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The DCT is adapted from Cohen and Olshtein’s Discourse Completion Test (1981) in the study of apology. There are five (5) prompts that have been modified into categories and will be adapted in the questionnaires. The categories are as follows:
1. Apologizing to a female stranger.
2. Apologizing to a male stranger.
3. Apologizing to a female friend.
4. Apologizing to a male friend.
5. Apologizing to a family member (mother, father, brother, sister).
Each category will contain two situations and under each situation, three columns of answers will be provided and participants will choose one of the three as their answer.
3.3 Sampling
The present study will use the purposive sampling method of study. The respondents are 50 students from UTAR, a private higher learning institution in Malaysia, comprising 25 males and 25 females and aged between 20 and 28. The respondents, drawn from the English Language (EL) and English Education (ED) courses from the Faculty of Arts and Social Science including 30 seniors and 20 juniors of undergraduates students.
3.4 Data collection procedure
The data will be collected by distributing questionnaires to the respondents outside of the classroom and inside the classroom with the permission of the lecturers that present in the classroom. During data collection, the respondents will be informed the purpose of the research. They will be asked to write what they would say based on the provided situations. The close- ended questionnaire consists of five categories with two situations in each category that an individual may face with in real life. The questionnaire also will ask respondents to select their gender by ticking right (√) in the gender box. The social distance is considered as one of the important variables in the study. They also will be asked to write their age and course they took to be taken as the additional information. (Turiman, Leong & Hassan, 2013).
3.5 Data analysis procedure
The strategies used by the respondents will be identified and categorized according to their types of apology strategies. Next, the overall frequencies of occurrence of each apology strategies in all ten situations will be calculated. Then, the types of apology strategies used by both men and women when apologizing to the same gender and the opposite will also be identified, and their frequencies will be calculated. Finally, the apology strategies used by the respondents will be categorized into the types of social distance which are family members, friends and strangers based on the respondents' answers to the situations. The frequency of each of the social distance types will be calculated. The information will be used to explain the results (Turiman, Leong & Hassan, 2013).
3.6 Conclusion
In this chapter, the researcher showed the introduction of the chapter, research design, instrumentation, sampling, data collection procedure and data analysis procedure. The next chapter which is chapter four includes the findings and discussions of the study. The last chapter which is chapter five includes the conclusion and recommendations of the study.