Journal of Research in Applied Linguistics
Volume:13 Issue: 2, Summer-Autumn 2022

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.

In this paper, we focus on the impoliteness metadiscourse (Culpeper, 2011) on Twitter about what was said by US President Joe Biden at a press conference where he cursed journalist Peter Doocy after he asked if inflation was a liability in the midterm elections. To do that, we searched for #sonofabitch, and found 610 original tweets with the tag in the days following the episode. After analyzing them, we discovered that the hashtag was employed to vilify both Joe Biden and Peter Doocy. The tag also prompted a discussion about impoliteness and shameful language in the political sphere. Moreover, the data also showed that the posts containing hashtags employed impolite formulae and negative assertions that characterized the process of online public shaming (Blitvich, 2022, p. 62).

Evaluations of polite, impolite and over-polite linguistic and nonlinguistic behaviors depend largely on the socio-cultural attributes of a society and the individuals’ schemata, which are rooted in the communicators’ previous experiences. In intercultural settings, communication represents a complicated picture due to the participants’ different socio-cultural backgrounds and their unshared cultural schemata. Adopting the discursive approach to (im)politeness and employing ethnographic methods, this study identifies some significant sources of (im)politeness-related miscommunication between 10 Malaysian university lecturers/professors and 15 Iranian students. The findings suggest that different socio-cultural behaviors as well as some aspects of professional practices are the sources of misunderstanding and have potential for either impolite or over-polite judgments. Findings are discussed in light of the practical and theoretical implications for intercultural politeness and impoliteness.

By adopting Goffman’s conception of face, this study develops the notion of a mutual face-maintaining act (MFMA), with a view to striking a balance between avoiding the risk of making an overgeneralization about politeness and attempting to offer a perspective applicable to real-life interactions. Drawing on a type of sport conversation—talks between NBA referees and players/coaches—this paper elucidates the notion of an MFMA, demonstrating that it is more applicable to current sports data than Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory and that it can be a feasible concept for interpreting politeness phenomena. The finding suggests that speakers whose social duty and objective is primarily to reach communicative concord in conversational contexts that involve potential tension and conflict may be more inclined to produce utterances by performing MFMAs.

The paper investigates the relationship between self, identity, and face in the Iranian culture by examining three lexemes shaxsiat (‘personality’, ‘character’), āberu (lit. water-of-face), and ru (lit. ‘front part of head’). Drawing on Goffman’s theory of face (1967) and the Self-Aspect Model of Identity (Simon, 2004), instances of the use of the lexemes in online sources and in daily conversations are ethnographically analyzed in their contexts of use to explore which aspect(s) of self are foregrounded in each case and what they reveal about a person’s identity and face. The findings suggest that shaxsiat comprises the individual self or identity of a person by foregrounding both the positively and negatively valenced self-aspects, and while āberu and ru are both relational aspects of shaxsiat; the former foregrounds primarily positively evaluated self-aspects that comprise collective identity, or face in its Goffmanian sense, and the latter highlights self-aspects that under traditional Iranian ways of thinking have to be concealed, suppressed, denied. The findings also suggest that facework is embedded in identity work and they co-construct each other.