Politeness Through The Prism Of Requests Apologies And Refusals

The challenges that EFL learners, teachers and teacher educators are facing today have increased considerably with the comparatively new role of English as the lingua franca of the modern world. For both learners and teachers, responding to these new demands involves mastering a broader set of communication skills and a wider range of competencies in English, L2 pragmatic competence being only one of them, albeit an extremely significant one. With this in mind, Politeness through the Prism of Requests, Apologies and Refusals explores various aspects of Serbian EFL learners’ (future EFL teachers’) pragmatic knowledge and metapragmatic awareness, both as elements of their communicative competence and as tools they can use to support their own students’ L2 pragmatic development. In addition to examining the language strategies they resort to in different communicative contexts and the reasoning behind their speech act strategy choice, this book also investigates the use of intonation to express and interpret pragmatic meanings. As one of the first steps towards assembling the complex jigsaw puzzle representing the pragmatic competence of Serbian learners of English, the book will be of considerable interest to researchers investigating aspects of L2 pragmatics in the speech of EFL learners, especially those with Slavic L1 backgrounds. Additionally, in offering an insight into the numerous challenges that future language professionals, including EFL teachers, face in the process of mastering L2 speech acts, the book will also be relevant to university EFL lecturers and teacher trainers.

Politeness is one of the very important issues in the field of sociolinguistics and pragmatics, as it can be seen in almost every type of our interactions. Since the evolving of the politeness theory (Brown and Levinson 1978), cross-cultural pragmatics has gained the attention of many researchers in this field. However, the Arab society has been far less investigated. Therefore, this book widens the scope of cross-cultural pragmatics by investigating politeness in (Moroccan) Arabic and contrasting the behavior of Arab and German speakers with regard to one type of politeness, namely the speech act of greeting. Furthermore, the implications of this study for foreign language teaching and cross-cultural training indicate that politeness and face concerns in different cultures should be part of any learning process. Hopefully, besides being informative, especially to scholars from other fields of intercultural communication research, this study should contribute to raise the awareness of sociolinguists in particular with respect to the role of religion in shaping politeness in Arabic and to serious confusion and misunderstandings that may come into being, when communicators from different cultural backgrounds cannot identify the pragmatic (implicit or indirect) meaning of their interlocutor’s utterance.

Pragmatics is one of the rapidly growing fields in contemporary linguistics. Huang provides an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the central topics in pragmatics - implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and deixis.

This volume is the first to give an account of speech act pragmatics and (im)politeness in film conversation and in dubbing translation, with a focus on requests. The scope of the book is twofold: on the one hand, it describes the pragmatic features of requests in English and Italian film dialogue, while, on the other, it reveals patterns and trends concerning their translation into dubbed Italian. The first part of the volume appeals to scholars in cross-cultural pragmatics and film conversation. Differences and similarities in requestive behaviour are investigated in a comparative perspective between the two film languages, while the pragmatic features typifying requests in film speech are analysed against features typifying requests in spontaneous conversation. The second section of the book will appeal to translation scholars, since it provides an insight into how the pragmatics and the (im)politeness of requests travel across languages in the translation process, thus contributing to the largely under-researched relationship between pragmatics and translation studies.

Pragmatic aspects of communication are increasingly high on the agenda of applied linguists, in parallel with the recent advancements in the broader field of pragmatics research. As such, this volume brings together contributions addressing pragmatic aspects of L2 communication, taking into account the complementary perspectives of researchers, language practitioners and language learners. These studies were conducted with both qualitative and quantitative methods, and were set in various linguo-cultural contexts, spanning from Norway through Croatia and Italy to Canada and Colombia. The volume illustrates how pragmatic awareness and proficiency are crucial to communicative, interactional and, more generally, social competence. It also sheds light on how the results of pragmatic investigations can be fruitfully applied to language teaching and assessment in primary and tertiary education. Finally, it maintains an expanded perspective on pragmatic knowledge, as it examines both verbal and nonverbal components of communication, showing how they all contribute to the formulation and interpretation of meanings in context. The book will be of interest to language students, language teachers and scholars in applied pragmatics.

This collection argues for the need to promote intercultural understanding as a clear goal for teaching and learning pragmatics in second and foreign language education. The volume sees the learning of pragmatics as a challenging yet enriching process whereby the individual expands their capacity for understanding how meaning making processes influence social relationships and how assumptions about social relationships shape the interpretation and use of language in context. This locates pragmatics within a humanistically oriented conception of learning where success is defined relative to the enrichment of human understanding and appreciation of difference. The book argues that intercultural understanding is not an “add on” to language learning but central to the learner’s ability to understand and construct meaning with individuals from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Chapters analyse teachers’ and learners’ ways of making sense of pragmatics, how their assumptions about social relationships impact their perceptions of language use, and how reflection on pragmatic judgments opens up possibilities for developing intercultural understanding. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in intercultural communication, language education, and applied linguistics.

The tenth volume in the TIRF-Routledge series, this book features research on the teaching and learning of English in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). With chapters written by TIRF Doctoral Dissertation Grant awardees and internationally known scholars, the volume addresses contemporary challenges and considerations to teaching English in the MENA context. With empirical research covering a wide range of under-studied contexts, this book provides important insights and future directions to improve research and instruction. Offering up-to-date research at the primary, secondary, and post-secondary levels, this volume is an essential resource for language education programs and pre-service teachers. Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

This Element introduces the areas that second language (L2) pragmatics research has investigated. It begins with a theme-based review of the field with respect to L2 pragmatics learning, teaching, and assessing. The section on pragmatics learning examines studies on learners' pragmatic production and perception, and analyzes research modalities in this field. The section on pragmatics teaching examines the effects of and different approaches to L2 pragmatics instruction; and the section on pragmatics assessing examines the aspects involved in testing learners' pragmatic competence, and studies on issues related to validity and rating in pragmatics assessing. The Element then analyzes studies exploring learners' cognitive processes during pragmatic performance, and case studies are provided to showcase two ongoing projects, one investigating advanced learners' self-praise on social media and the other investigating lingua franca pragmatics among children. Finally, the Element offers some topics and questions for future research in L2 pragmatics.