When once is not enough: Politeness of multiple requests in oral proficiency interviews

Abstract

The paper takes a conversation-analytic approach to examine the politeness of multiple requests in Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPI). In this assessment activity, interviewers regularly reissue a first request in environments of increased task demands or in response to candidates' difficulties with the first directive. In such multiple request sequences, two kinds of structurally parallel operations of mitigation and conventionally indirect request frames are observed. For the most part, interviewers treat mitigational material and conventionally indirect request frames as dispensable in the subsequent version, a pattern seen in multiple requests in same-turn as well as in other-initiated and third position repair. When local contingencies increase the risk that the interviewer's request may not generate the projected action, subsequent versions tend to be prefaced by the marker please. Furthermore, in environments of topic introduction or change, presequences also play a politeness-implicative role. The paper closes by considering some implications of the analysis for an interaction-based theory of politeness.

Preference structure in L2 Arabic requests

“…Over the last decade, however, a number of researchers have called for taking extended interactions into account and adopted a more holistic approach by using conversation analysis (CA). Initially employed in sociology, CA investigates how social actions are accomplished through talk and its detailed analysis of interactional data makes it attractive for second language acquisition research in general and interlanguage pragmatics research in particular as recent programmatic papers and studies attest (e.g., Al-Gahtani and Roever 2012;Gonzales-Lloret 2010;Kasper 2006c;Pekarek Doehler and Pochon-Berger 2011;Wagner and Gardner 2004).…”

“…The speech act of request is the most commonly researched speech act in ILP (Kasper 2008) and over the past 5 years, a growing number of studies have examined request forms from the perspective of CA (e.g., Al-Gahtani and Roever 2012; Curl and Drew 2008;Heinemann 2006;Huth 2006;Kasper 2006c;Kasper and Ross 2007;Lee 2009;Taleghani-Nikazm and Huth 2010). However, one issue to have received little attention in these studies is pragmatic development, which is of course a central concern in interlanguage pragmatics (Kasper and Rose 2002).…”

Polite appearances: How non-manual features convey politeness in British Sign Language

“…Some studies that have incorporated prosody have done so relatively superficially (Trees and Manusov 1998) or as a secondary focus, as in the analysis of requests in different varieties of Central American Spanish (Félix-Brasdefer 2009) and Kasper's (2006) study of oral proficiency interviews. The reticence to explore prosody for politeness may stem from the practical difficulties involved in this type of research.…”

Repairing "Failed" Questions in Foreign Language Classrooms

“…Studies on English oral proficiency interviews (OPIs), such as Kasper (2006) and Kasper and Ross (2007), have found the same practices employed by the interviewers, but a difference was discovered in their orientation to the trouble source of the non-answer. In Gardner's (2004) study, non-answers in L1-L2 speaker conversations were treated as an indication of possible disagreement to the assertion in the question, not as incompetence of L2 speakers.…”