Indonesia Conference Directory

Apologies are the most fundamental strategies for remedying offences and reflecting the degree of the speaker-s politeness. However, Arabic textbooks in boarding schools in Indonesia lack of materials that are very required to help students to develop their pragmatic competence of the apology speech acts in Arabic. This study assumes to investigate, explicitly, the language of the students- apologizing in boarding schools in Indonesia and enhancing the students- pragmatic competence in a non-native language; Arabic. Two-hundred one informants were chosen purposively; one-hundred and one male participants and one-hundred and one female participants. Informants were assigned to fill in a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) questionnaire consists of eight situations about the boarding school rules. The findings showed that the boarding school students employed apology strategies that are vary from the Arabic standards of apologizing to some extent. The students overused the head act strategy expression of regret. In other words, the students overused the expressions afwan and asif to remedy light and serious offences. These two expressions are used by Arabs to remedy light offences only. The students believe that the apology strategies are universal so they transfer directly, the Head Act strategies in particular, from L1 into L2. Thus, in order to enhance the BSS-s realization of the speech acts of apologizing in Arabic, it is a requisite to develop the current textbooks that may develop their pragmatic knowledge.