Background and Purpose: Cultural collisions in tourism communication can elicit obstacles or failure to achieve communication goals in social interactions with people of different backgrounds. A communication between cultures can present misunderstandings, vagueness in meanings and frustration due to the diverse social and cultural norms arising from various discourse systems. Among the several types of tourism communication, this study attempted to foreground delivering instructions, which is a frequently utilised speech act (SA) during tour sessions. More specifically, the study examined the use of SA in giving instructions, as expressed by tour guides throughout tour sessions. Delivering instructions is a straightforward mode of communication, even in intercultural context.   Methodology: This study adopted a qualitative research method through the collection of data from audio and visual recordings, along with observational notes from interactions between tour guides and tourists particularly during the five Free Independent Travel (FIT) packages. Five Japanese speaking Malaysian tour guides and 17 Japanese tourists (JTs) were recruited for this study. Categorisation of directive speech act (DSA) by Searle (1979) and structure formation of SDA by Blum-Kulka (1989) were employed to analyse the subcategories of directive.   Findings: Findings indicate that only three subcategories were used, namely the command, insist, and request. The findings also reveal that there were alignments and adjustments to the expressions or utterances when giving instructions. With the aim of effective intercultural communication, the tour guides were identified to have adapted to the tourist culture. The expression of instructions even in an intercultural context did not confer any contradiction of cultural norms, and were unlikely to cause conflict between the tour guides and the JTs.   Contributions: This research is expected to serve as a foundation and reference for parties involved in the teaching and learning of the Japanese language, especially in the expression of SA for tourism communication.   Keywords: Speech act, giving directive, Malaysian tourism, tourism communication, Malaysia tour guide.   Cite as: Rashid, R. A., Mat, N. H., Kamaruzaman, A. S., Ibrahim, M. Y., Noh, C. H. C., & Matsutani, S. (2021). The descriptive analysis of Japanese language directive speech acts in intercultural context by Malaysian tour guides in tour sessions communication. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 6(2), 358-378. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol6iss2pp358-378

Politeness in Japanese society is highly perceived in social interaction especially politeness in business interaction where in Japanese culture customers must be served with high degree of politeness as they are regarded as the (customer as the god) concept. In this context, inquiry on the (im)politeness interaction between Japanese speaking Malaysian tour guide and Japanese tourists during a tour trip session is crucial in examining the Japanese tourists perception on the use of (im)politeness to decide at what extend the host is polite or impolite during the interaction and are there exceptions for non-native speaker such as given the flexibility to not adhere to the Japanese norms? Thus, this study aims to determine Japanese tourists' perspective from the use of politeness by Japanese speaking Malaysian tourist guide. Questionnaire is used as the research techniques in collecting data. This study involves 200 Japanese tourists visiting Malaysia selected using purposive sampling. The expected result of this study is assisting tour guide in using the expected politeness aspect in order to avoid Face Threatening Act (FTA) which will affect the satisfaction of the tour trip and most likely politeness aspect will be neglected as the most important element is the tour guide successfully conveyed the particular information during the tour guiding session.

Questioning is an activity that takes place in our daily lives. It has been said that one's knowledge is gained by questioning. Tourism communication which is involved intercultural elements may still need be consciously careful of socially and culturally of other cultures' norms when questioning. Therefore, this study was aimed to explore how the questioning were applied or formed by Japanese-speaking Malaysian to Japanese tourists during tour trip session. Based on attributes and categories of questioning, this study will developed a model of question levels that were often used throughout the visit. This study is a qualitative study and the data is collected through audio, visual and observational notes on the interaction of five Malay tour guides when using the Japanese language while interacting with 17 Japanese tourists during four sets of Free Independence Travel (FIT) package. The findings showed that for the purpose of smooth communication, various categories of questions were applied due to the application of coordination and adjustment. The findings also revealed that the level of questions applied during the tour session were only at Level 1 of both domains of the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Bloom (1984) [1]. This study is expected to become a reference point in the field of education and the domain of learning the Japanese language. Owning in the application of questions can be enhanced with the use of suitable applied questions while explaining the tourism destination. This study is most relevant to the key players in the national tourism industry, most specifically tour guides.