Apology response strategies used by Indonesian EFL fresh graduates: on gender and academic achievement

The challenge for language teachers is to make the students able to communicate in the target language. One of the language aspects that many EFL learners, including university students, still struggle to produce appropriate responses is pragmatic competence. This study attempts to investigate whether gender and academic achievement were significant to predict Apology Response strategies used by EFL fresh graduates. Thirty fresh graduates, 18 females and 12 males, from an English Department of a state university in Indonesia were selected as the participants. Their academic achievement was simply derived from their GPAs which then were grouped into three levels of low, middle, high categories. The instrument used was Discourse Completion Task (DCT) which was used as scenario. The participants were asked to answer the DCT orally through interview. The DCT results were then classified into Acceptance (AC), Acknowledgement (AK), Evasion (EV), and Rejection (RJ). The three variables were then analysed using descriptive qualitative approach. The results were quite elaborate. Most of the participants tend to use Evasion strategy when responding to apologies; however, the number of males who apply Acceptance was also significant. Similarly, for the academic achievement, participants with high GPA do not necessarily employ Acceptance and vice versa. To conclude, neither gender nor academic achievement can be considered as the significant predicators of Apology Response strategies used by the participants. This study is expected to be useful for teachers or lecturers to consider Pragmatics studies in their teaching and learning activities.