Preference of Indirect Answers by High School Students

Key words: Politeness, Second language acquisition,Indirectness, Conventionally Indirect Answers, Tendency to select ABSTRACT This paper, based on a qualitative study conducted among high school students, investigates the tendency to select non-conventionally indirect answers by high school students while performing basic speech acts.The instrument used in the study was a discourse completion test (DCT), which has ten multiple-choice questions. In this instrument, the subjects were given five request, two offer and two invitation situations. The survey included twenty-five ninth-year students learning English at a government high school.According to the findings of the study, the majority of subjects preferred to give conventionally indirect (CI) answers in request situations. As for the offer and invitation situations, the results showed that the percentage of selecting non-conventionally indirect (NCI) answers was higher than the others for rejecting an offer or an invitation. Finally, some suggestions have been developed for further research.