Students’ self-perceptions of apologies to instructors

ABSTRACT

Adopting retrospective verbal report, or RVR as the instrument, this study reports an analysis of the perceptions of native-English-speaking (NES) and non-native-English-speaking (NNES) students, who apologised to their instructors in coursework-related situations. Sixty NESs from different levels and disciplinary areas and 63 NNESs (Arabic and Chinese L1s) from an Intensive English programme were sampled to represent the student population in a US university. Each participant was asked to complete a discourse completion task (DCT) in response to three apology situations, and this resulted in a total of 369 apology messages. A RVR was conducted immediately following the completion of the DCT. Students’ perceptions gathered through the RVR were categorised according to four factors, including apology strategy use, professionalism, contextual variables, and language use. Results showed that NES and NNES students had different considerations in producing institutional apologies. For example, multiple NES students addressed the severity of the apology situations, which was not mentioned at all by NNES students. Both groups reported having minimal or no instruction on how apologies should be made in academic communication, an area that warrants pedagogical interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Retrospective verbal report
• apologies
• perceptions
• academic communication

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the co-editor, Leila Ranta, for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Any remaining errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Spencer-Oatey (2008) explained sociality rights as follows: ‘People regard themselves as having a range of sociality rights and obligations in relation to other people, and they typically base these on one or more of the factors showing below: Contractual/legal agreements and requirements, explicit and implicit conceptualizations of roles and positions (e.g., in a job contract), behavioral conventions, styles and protocols (e.g., a meeting agenda)’ (p. 15).

2. Low-proficiency ESL learners were not chosen because a pilot study showed that the tasks in this study were too demanding for them to complete in a timely manner. High-proficiency ESL learners were not able to be recruited because they were tested out from the IEP programme and were difficult to locate under the setting of the current study.

3. The reason for this division is twofold: (1) Since the majority of the student population is Arabic-speaking (except 14 Chinese students) and is generally stronger in speaking than writing, their spoken production at Level 4 is considered to be stronger than their written production. (2) All Level 5 students were taking first-year composition as their writing class. Since this writing class met in a computer lab once per week, it was convenient to obtain emailed apologies from these students.

4. Only one word choice (Talk to vs. Write an email to) was included in the actual instruction handed to the student participant, and this corresponds with the type of apology the student was asked to provide.

5. Missing an important lecture right before the final may result a low or even failing grade in the exam. Missing an important appointment with the instructor does not only harm the relationship with the instructor but also leads to the issue, the one to be discussed in the missed appointment, unresolved. An important assignment that is turned in late will not likely to be accepted or may result in a lower grade even if it is accepted.

6. All examples listed in this study are all direct, unedited quotes from students.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dongmei Cheng

Dongmei Cheng is an assistant professor in TESOL/Applied Linguistics at Texas A&M University-Commerce. Her research interests include second language pragmatics, second language writing, and computer-assisted language instruction.