Politeness and pragmatic competence in foreign language education

Abstract

Anecdotal evidence indicates that some native speakers of English are uncomfortable with what they perceive to be the lack of linguistic politeness forms in the speech of some Japanese speakers of English. A common example is found in the expression of desires and wants, when a Japanese speaker will say 'I want you to do X', rather than 'I'd like you to do X'. As it is possible the learning materials Japanese students used in secondary school EFL had an influence on their ability to use politeness markers in their L2, this paper will report on an analysis of evidence of politeness in senior high school textbooks. First, in order to go beyond the anecdotal evidence, there is a review of some of the relevant literature on linguistic politeness. The analysis follows in which it will be seen that there is a noticeable absence of politeness. Finally, five speculations on explanations for the absence of linguistic politeness markers are suggested in an effort to raise the awareness of language educators about this component of pragmatic competence.

Is There Room for Pragmatic Knowledge in English Books in Iranian High Schools?

“…As Vellenga (2004) mentioned, the explanatory nature of meta-language can provide students with rich extra-linguistic information such as interlocutors' status, cultural information, usage notes and other relevant contextual information. For example, the discussions like "Using please makes the utterance polite."…”

“…Or in another study undertaken by Vellenga (2004), the books chosen for analysis are developed in a way that include special contexts in which pragmatic knowledge is clearly incorporated. However, in this study, one can claim that the sentences or phrase that the author has taken as pragmatic knowledge are in fact for the sake of teaching syntactic knowledge, and it seems that inclusion of pragmatic knowledge was not in the mind of Iranian EFL text books developers while writing these books.…”

“…However, in this study, incorporation of three of them; namely, directive speech acts, commissive speech acts and expressive speech acts has been explored. This selection has been done on the one hand based on Vellenga's (2004) study and on the other hand since Iranian EFL textbooks especially Pre-University English textbook are mostly transactional rather than being interactional, most of the sections especially the passages are based on factual information, so all of the sentences of text can be regarded as representative which can not considered in this study. Therefore representive category is ignored.…”

The (ab)use of taboo lexis in audiovisual translation: Raising awareness of pragmatic variation in English-Spanish

“…Liao 2006 for college students in Taiwan) and some have incorporated translation within a communicative approach (Nation 2001;Webb 2007). Translation has also been used in testing pragmatic competence, e. g. for the pair English and Japanese (LoCastro 1997).…”

Pragmática da interlíngua e pragmática instrucional: dois campos de pesquisa vibrantes e elucidativos

“…No entanto, muitos outros fenômenos comunicativos e idiossincrasias do comportamento comunicativo dos alunos em sua respectiva L2 não foram desconsiderados por especialistas nesse campo. É suficiente citar os estudos sobre a falha pragmática (THOMAS, 1983;BEEBE;TAKAHASHI, 1989), transferência pragmática (KASPER, 1992), (im) polidez e trabalho relacional (HINKEL, 1996;LOCASTRO, 1997), gerenciamento conversacional (KÖNIG, 2013; SHIVELY, 2015) ou o uso de marcadores pragmáticos ou discursivos (ROMERO TRILLO, 2002; GÁNEM-GUTIÉRREZ; ROEHR, 2011). Por outro lado, os trabalhos que abordam a compreensão de L2 são menos numerosos, embora não por esse motivo sejam menos esclarecedores ou úteis.…”