“You are fine”: Examining the Impact of Gender and Nativeness on Responses to Apologies

Abstract

We aimed to explore the most and least used strategies of apology responses, as well as the differences between native and non-native speakers of English in formulating such responses. Additionally, we investigated the role of gender in the formulation of apology responses. The participants were 100 native and non-native speakers of English at an American university, who had to respond to two volunteers’ apologies for blocking their path. The results regarding both genders indicate that the acceptance strategy was used the most frequently, while the evasion strategy was least used. Moreover, native speakers used more words than their non-native speaker counterparts. Furthermore, the syntactic structures of non-native speakers’ apology responses were less sophisticated than those of native speakers. In terms of gender differences, men utilized the acceptance strategy more frequently than did women, whereas women showed a higher tendency to use the rejection strategy. Finally, the average number of words used by women in apology responses aimed at non-native and native speakers differed significantly, whereas this was not significant in the case of men. Based on our results, teachers and students should pay more attention to pragmatic competency learning in addition to conventional learning.