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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 26, No. 0, pp.1242-1262
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Oct 2026
Received 12 Aug 2026 Revised 12 Sep 2026 Accepted 30 Sep 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.26..202610.1242

Requests and Refusals in Adult ESL: Self-Perceived Pragmatic Competence and Reported Instructional Experiences Among Immigrant Learners in New York

Nourddine Binij ; Hicham Latif
(First and corresponding author) Researcher and PhD student, Department of English Studies Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences Ibn Zohr University B.P 29/S, Rue Hassan Bounaâmani, Agadir, Morocco, Tel: +212-699429312 nourddine.binij@edu.uiz.ac.ma
(Co-author) Professor, Department of English Studies Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences Ibn Zohr University h.latif@uiz.ac.ma


© 2026 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Adult ESL learners in New York need English for socially appropriate communication in everyday institutional and community contexts. This study examined immigrant adult ESL learners’ self-perceived pragmatic competence in two speech acts, requests and refusals, and their reported experiences of classroom instruction in these acts. It described the levels of competence learners attributed to themselves, the instructional practices they reported experiencing, and the learner-background variables associated with differences in self-perceived competence. Data were collected from 95 adult ESL students in the final week of the second 14-week instructional cycle using a 15-item Likert-scale questionnaire. Requests and refusals had been scheduled for instruction during Week 5 of each cycle; thus, the questionnaire was administered nine weeks after the most recent scheduled lesson. Learners rated their competence close to the scale midpoint and appeared to rate themselves considerably more able to make requests than to refuse politely. This difference seems to be specific rather than general, since learners reported equivalent command of the expressions for both speech acts while reporting substantially less ability to produce a refusal without external support. Learners also reported frequent single-episode presentation of target expressions and frequent teacher explanation of appropriateness, together with very limited delayed review and very limited practice with varied interlocutors. No learner-background variable was associated with self-perceived competence. The findings indicate that recycled, contextualized, and interlocutor-varied practice was largely absent from the instruction these learners reported, and that refusals may warrant more sustained instructional attention than requests in adult ESL settings.

Keywords:

adult ESL, immigrant learners, requests, refusals, pragmatic competence, instructed pragmatics, self-assessment

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