Understanding im/politeness across cultures: an interactional approach to raising sociopragmatic awareness

Abstract

Politeness is an important aspect of communication, particularly across cultures where misunderstandings can have very negative relational consequences. Yet while various approaches to politeness in the context of second language learning have been developed, such approaches have either been largely atheoretical in their conceptualisation of politeness or have employed models that do not adequately capture participant understandings of politeness across cultures. In this paper, it is argued that an approach encompassing participant understandings of politeness is a more appropriate starting point for raising sociopragmatic awareness about im/politeness across languages and cultures. An interactional approach whereby raising pragmalinguistic awareness about the interactional achievement of particular meanings and actions in interaction is combined with raising sociopragmatic awareness about what underlies evaluations of those meanings and actions as im/polite is advocated. It is argued that raising sociopragmatic awareness in this way provides learners with the means to analyse differences between the politeness systems of their first and second languages, thereby allowing them to make more informed choices in regards to both constituting their L2 identities as well as their relationships with others.

‘Democracy’ in education: an omnipresent yet distanced ‘other’

“…Here defensive discourse strategies such as speech repairs can mark facework (Lee, 2013). When the face is threatened, indicated in the excerpt by the audience's reaction to the keynote speaker's question on line 1 and by the Speaker's rewording of the question on line 4, the speaker is trying to make the face consistent with their utterances (Haugh and Chang, 2015). In this instance, the keynote speaker avoids confrontation with the audience by not repeating the word 'culture', instead, the speaker decides to use the word 'practice'.…”

Negative Politeness Strategies in What Would You Do? TV Show

“…In Indonesian context, the participants' authentic verbal actions in this TV show can be used as English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching-learning materials to raise students' sociopragmatic awareness of politeness across languages and cultures. Referring to Haugh and Chang (2015), the English examples of politeness might be compared to the students' L1 or L2 contexts so that they can reflect on the sociopragmatic similarities and differences of politeness in their ambient languages and the learnt foreign language. Such data from the TV show might also be used to make the students recognize, for instance, particular discourse markers to show politeness.…”

“…Politeness is a form of respect (Brown & Levinson, 1987;Holmes, 1995) and functions to reduce or avoid conflicts (Lakoff, 1976, Siffianou, 1992 and to create balance (Leech, 1983) in communication. Related to language politeness, there has been a large body of research conducted in different countries, discussing -among others-the strategies performed in various settings (i.e., AlAfnan, 2014;Al-Sobh, 2013;Banikalef, Maros, Aladdin and Al-Natour, 2015;Fitriyani & Andriyanti, 2020;Jeanyfer & Tanto, 2018;Jegarlooei & Allami, 2018;Mu, 2015;Ramadhani, Gurning, & Sibarani, 2014;Senowarsito, 2013), the markers (Jegarlooei & Allami, 2018;Terkourafi, 2011), as well as its relation to culture (i.e., Haugh & Chang, 2015;Huang, 2008;Leech, 2005) and gender (Jegarlooei & Allami, 2018). This present study focuses on negative politeness strategies, a topic which is rarely discussed because most scholars researching politeness strategies included both positive and negative strategies.…”

“We Need to Start Thinking Ahead”: The Impact of Social Context on Linguistic Norm Adherence

“…Politeness -Strategies for mitigating utterance face-threat vary across social relationships and sociocultural contexts (Haugh & Chang, 2015), but often include gratitude, deference, apologizing, and saying "please" (Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Sudhof, Jurafsky, Leskovec, & Potts, 2013) (as well as the use of indirect speech acts (Clark & Schunk, 1980)). These strategies typically avoid violation of sociocultural politeness norms while violating Grice's Maxim of Manner (by, again, failing to be brief).…”