Building Students’ Refusal Strategy Awareness Using Movies

Abstract

This research is motivated by the urgency of building English department students’ awareness on their pragmatic abilities to use language based on the context and situation, especially on refusal in English. It aims at building students’ awareness on the refusal strategies by using movie as learning media. Movie is chosen as it contains a lot of refusal expressions and expected to give the students’ reference in using refusal strategies based on the appropriate situation and context. Furthermore, movie is considered as the direct life portrait of certain language community to make the students understand the refusal strategies as the cultural context of the community. The design of this research is case study since it tries to capture the learning process of using movie to build students’ awareness on refusal strategies. The research subject is the students of English department year two. Observation, questionnaire and DCT were used to collect the data. The observation results showed that movie was beneficial in building the students’ awareness on using refusal strategies. The expressions in the movie could help students locate the interlocutors of the utterance so that they could finally understand several strategies to do refusal. The DCT results revealed that the students did indirect refusals. The results also showed that they could differentiate the strategies to do refusals based on the status of interlocutors. Finally, based on the questionnaire, it could be found that most of the students gave positive responses toward the use of movie as learning media and suggested that movie was potential in building their awareness on refusal strategies.