The Study of Refusal Strategies of Japanese Speaking Thai Tour Guide and the Related Factors

Abstract

This research aims to study the following: 1) to study the refusal strategies toward requests, invitations and permissions among of Japanese tour guides in Thailand. 2) to study impact of factors such as intimacy and seniority on refusal strategy.  Data were collected from a group of 15 tour guides through a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and in-depth interview. The questionnaire DCT consisted of 4 situations, divided into 1 refusal of a request, 1 refusal of an invitation and 2 refusal of permission. All 4 situations were determined by factors such as intimacy and seniority.

            The results of the study are summarized as follows: 1) Tour guides employed a variety of strategies to refuse Japanese tourists. The five most common strategies were: (1) apologizing, (2) providing reasons, (3) evading responsibility, (4) directly refusing, and (5) issuing threats. Factors such as intimacy and seniority influenced the choice of refusal strategies and the level of politeness in speech. From the interviews, it was found that most tour guides claimed to be highly aware of the level of familiarity when using language. However, the actual speech acts showed that they paid less attention to familiarity. Nevertheless, their stated awareness of familiarity was still higher than that of seniority. In actual practice, however, the tour guides used polite expressions that reflected a greater consideration for seniority than for familiarity.