Preference Structure in Refusals by Chinese Female International Students

This study aims to examine refusals from a sequential perspective guided by Politeness Theory. It advances politeness theory and contributes pertinent data to L2 pragmatics by exploring how female students utilise linguistic, social, and situational resources to construct preference structures and convey politeness. The research involved 60 Chinese female international students enrolled at a university in Malaysia. Refusals were elicited through Discourse Completion Tests, a questionnaire with 16 scenarios that varied in three controlled variables: social distance (acquaintances, strangers, intimates), eliciting acts (suggestions, offers, requests), and gender (addressing the same, opposite, or unspecified gender). The study analysed preference structures from the dimensions of content, order, and frequency based on refusal classification developed by Beebe et al. (1990), guided by Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory. The findings revealed that participants varied in preference structures, with sequences prioritising multi-element patterns of more recycled sub-strategies, such as ‘Reason’ and ‘Gratitude’ to mitigate face-threat and encode politeness in their refusal production. The study offers pedagogical implications for pragmatic teaching in intercultural communication contexts.