Currently, not abundant research exploring the use of emotion-laden words— such as swear words— in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) contexts has been conducted. In fact, most of the studies have focused on positive and negative emotion words (Pavlenko, 2008) — ignoring taboo words (Jay, 2008; Pavlenko, 2008; Dewaele, 2010)— and the attention has been drawn to their use by L2 users or/and multilinguals in ESL (English as a Second Language) contexts. Therefore, this preliminary two-fold study attempts to explore, on one hand, how the self-reported knowledge of swear words by EFL learners in tertiary education in Chile relate to specific variables; on the other hand, we wanted to understand when, where and with whom (Jay, 2008) these learners reported using swear words in English. We collected information through an online questionnaire, which elicited their self-perceived proficiency in English, educational background, initial exposure to L2 and a list of the swear words they claimed to know. This information helped us to explore the variables that relate to swear word knowledge and also to categorize the instances when swearing occurs, using existing categories (Pavlenko, 2014; Horan, G. 2013; Jay, 2008) and generating new ones. The findings suggest EFL learners mostly swear as an Automatic Emotional Response (Jay & Janchewitz, 2008), as well as a face-saving act and to protect others from the offensiveness of L1 swear words. Finally, this also helped us define what variables were worth considering in the second stage of our research, as they relate to incidental and explicit learning in EFL.
Keywords:
pragmatics, EFL, swear words, emotional language, emotion-laden words
Tironi, A., & Adaros, J. (2018). "WHAT THE F*CK WAS THAT?!” A PRELIMINARY STUDY ON THE USE OF SWEAR WORDS BY UNIVERSITY ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNERS IN CHILE. Lenguas Modernas, (49), Pág. 9 – 25. Retrieved from https://nomadias.uchile.cl/index.php/LM/article/view/49215
