Regulative Discourse for Pre-Schoolers: Should English Language Teachers Be Polite?

This study aims to contribute to the research literature on politeness in language teachers’ requestive behaviour. More specifically, it adopts a multilingual approach to explore teachers’ politeness strategies in the English for Young Learners (EYL) classroom, an underresearched instructional setting where regulative discourse tends to predominate. Participants are two pre-school teachers and two intact groups of 4/5-year-old children. 1,942 procedural and disciplinary directives in six video-recorded lessons are processed from a discourse-pragmatic perspective centred on directness, modifiers, and person deixis. The emerging syntactic and sequential design of regulative discourse seems to respond to factors like activity type and differing understandings of classroom power relations or deontic stances (Stevanovic, 2011). Results can serve as an awareness-raising exercise useful to draw attention to the need of strengthening practitioners’ pragmatic sensitivity in teacher training.