Fostering civility and politeness awareness in professional discourse: Critical genre analysis of course books in professional communication

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse a set of communicative events within the service encounter genre in tourism and leisure interdiscursive domains as displayed in course books on professional communication in English (commonly pointing to ESP). These supposedly replicate interaction in real life settings. Therefore, it is relevant to uncover the ways authentic interactions can be interpreted in the pedagogical setting of workplace conversation from a discursive and pragmatic perspective. More specifically, this empirical and exploratory study discusses ways of improving rapport management skills in interpersonal and intercultural communication, in general, and in professional interaction, in particular, in a selection of excerpts on greeting / asking for info exchanges. The study uncovers participants’ possible co-constructions of civility and politeness strategies in naturally occurring classroom discourse supported by course materials in English for glocal communication across segments in the tourism domain as object of this study.