Cultural and Gender Differences in the Speech Act of Apologizing

This research aims to investigate apology strategies used by American and Korean male and female students in order to elucidate similarities and differences between them. The data were collected by the discourse completion test (DCT) comprising seven apology situations. Sociopragmatic factors such as social distance, social status, and severity of offense were deliberately embedded in each situation. Four groups consisted of 10 NE-males, 10 NE-females, 10 EFL-males, and 10 EFL-females participated in this study. This study uses apology speech-act sets because most responses involved combinations of major apology strategies such as IFID+EXPL. Two research questions were formulated: First, what is the impact of culture and gender in the course of performing the speech act of apology? Second, what is the impact of sociopragmatic factors such as social distance, social status, and severity of offense on the selection of apology strategies? Based on major findings, some pedagogical implications for enhancing the communicative competence of Korean EFL students were discussed.