Speech act of complaints among low English proficiency speakers

Abstract

Speech act of complaint is one of the face threatening acts (FTA). In Malaysian Polytechnic syllabus, one of the skills tested in English course is on the speech act of complaint. Teachers realize that students have difficulties when performing the act of complaint based on the assessment given to them in their English class. The study of the speech act of complaints has been done by many researchers, however, in Malaysian context they are very limited studies among low English proficiency speakers. The study aims to investigate the complaint strategies employed by low English proficiency speakers (both male and female) as well as the politeness strategies adopted by using the politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1987). 80 Malay Polytechnic students equally both male and female respondents were selected to be the respondents. The instrument used was Discourse Completion Test (DCT) containing five different scenarios of making complaints ranging from different level of power differences. The students’ responses on complaints scenarios were then coded in terms of seven major categories: expression of annoyance, interrogation, explicit complaint, accusation, justification and request for repair. The result indicated that the highest number of frequency for complaint strategies employed by low proficiency speakers is request for repair and the least was expression of annoyance. Generally, low English proficiency speakers seemed to adopt negative politeness and the study identified that there was no significant difference between male and female in their preference of complaints strategies and politeness strategies. Due to the limited English proficiency of the speakers, this study found that learners were not able to make appropriate complaints. Low English proficiency speakers preferred to initiate complaints explicitly regardless of different power relation. The study has its implication towards teaching speech acts where exposure should be given to the learners in terms of phrases and clauses in a variety of complaint scenarios depending on the different power relation in order to help learners to make an appropriate complaint in the target language.