Refusing and canceling an appointment via voice message in Italian. Which models for assessing learners’ performance?

This study explores how two related speech acts—refusals and cancellations—are realized by Italian speakers through voice messages. While refusals have been widely investigated in pragmatics research, cancellations remain underexplored. The aim is to identify general trends in the realization of these acts, offering empirical reference points for the teaching and assessment of Italian as a second language. Data were collected using oral discourse completion tasks (ODCTs), prompting participants to respond to two scenarios via voice messages. The analysis revealed several shared features: both refusals and cancellations tend to be lengthy and include justifications, often framed using the Impossibility strategy to shift responsibility away from the speaker. Both acts also commonly feature Remedial Moves and a high frequency of modifiers. However, notable differences emerged, linked to the distinct social dynamics of the two scenarios. Cancellations, occurring in peer relationships, featured more empathy expressions and direct apologies, while refusals, typically involving asymmetric relationships, relied more on general statements of regret. These findings highlight the pragmatic expertise of native speakers not as a standard of linguistic superiority, but as a benchmark shaped by sociocultural participation. In the context of L2 assessment, corpus-based data such as these provide a useful alternative to subjective intuitions.