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.