THE NEWSLETTER OF THE BUSINESS ENGLISH SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP, SUMMER 2015, ISSUE 90

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Politeness principles across cultures

Marisa Constantinides, Dip.RSA, M.A. App Ling, is a teacher trainer and DOS of CELT Athens. She trains teachers face-to-face and online on a variety of teacher courses including CELTA & Delta. She is a moderator of #ELTchat on Twitter (@Marisa_C) & blogs at http://marisaconstantinides.edublogs.org

Marisa Constantinides asks how well politeness principles travel across cultures.

In most needs driven courses nowadays, there will be some components responding to the need of learners to acquire sociolinguistic competence and the wise ESP teacher will probably make sure she provides phrases and functional listings, plus activities to get the students to “do things with words” that go well beyond grammatical accuracy. But still some learners sound aggressive and abrupt in their interactions, and not only because of intonation.

Being polite may differ from culture to culture – there are linguistic and paralinguistic means of conveying politeness, distance and respect which do not hold true in every language. Take the classic French tu-vous distinction or εσύ-εσείς in Greek; using this plural of respect and distance makes politeness easier to spot. For learners coming from these or similar languages, the absence of this in English is rather unsettling and difficult to replace with other linguistic tools.

Another politeness indicator is the highly frequent use of please in English and many other languages. In Greek, this is not used as often as it is in English, so people tend to say that Greeks are rude! Yet, informal requests incorporate this ‘please’ function via other means:

1. The use of the noun suffix –ακι which acts as a diminutive and makes the request less direct, or friendlier.

2. A softer intonation while making such a request using an imperative will further make it sound less abrupt.

The Greek learner who translates word for word into English will generally sound aggressive, rude or abrupt, as they will most often be oblivious to the need to replace their own politeness indicators with their English equivalent.

No wonder Greek businessmen are rumoured to be rather aggressive and abrupt in their business negotiations (Ron White, in a talk he delivered some years ago for TESOL Greece).

Are these rules/ principles the same worldwide?In the boardrooms of the world, different rules will abide and different cultures, microclimates and conventions. How quickly you can reduce distance and converse in a more intimate and familiar way will be very different in a boardroom in the US from, say, a boardroom in an Arab country, or in Japan. What sounds polite in English may sound gruff in some cultures and what sounds polite in another country, may sound cloying, or even ingratiating in English, no question.

But in most cases, our adult learners are not aware of these perceptions of them formed by others. They are not aware of the fact that their professional or academic persona, which comes across just as it should in their native language, can be distorted beyond recognition in the foreign language, projecting an image of themselves which would appal and horrify them, if they knew.

Should they not know or should they be left to discover this the hard way?The impressions and judgements non-teacher-native English users form of non-native English users are often formed by linguistic manner, not by linguistic accuracy.

Being tolerant, patient and understanding of the learning effort, of lack of knowledge, is one thing. Leaving your learners in the dark is another. For the business English student, this is, indeed, important information. Careers can be unmade because of such linguistic faux pas.

But it’s not just in business that you need to be aware of politeness rules. I do think it’s our job to let people know what they sound like when interacting in English and what impressions they

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may create. If the learners decide they do not wish to change, as some do, out of a particular kind of ethnic pride, that’s just fine. It’s their decision, not ours.

How can we incorporate this type of work into speaking activities/practice?

Teacher error correction and the politeness principle

Teachers’ correction focus tends to fall mostly on errors of grammar, or inaccuracies in functional exponents. Sometimes they will also respond to errors of pronunciation of individual words, of sound clusters or vocabulary errors. This is expected and highly useful for the learner.

Feedback related to politeness is very infrequent, indeed almost non-existent. And yet so much of adult human communication succeeds or breaks down because of the absence or presence of good manners!

Such feedback ought to mention whether and to what degree they:

• took their turn at the right time or gave up their turn at the right moment

• produced just the right amount of talk, no more, no less, just what was necessary to carry on and promote the discussion/develop the topic

• used appropriate intonation• stressed the right word in each phrase

to convey the central focus of their message – i.e. new information

• showed appreciation for other speakers’ contributions; did not pontificate in an unnecessary manner

• were respectful of others’ opinions even though they may have differed from their own

• avoided interrupting others unless absolutely necessary & then apologised for doing so

• used language which was of the right tenor for the roles, relationships, relative statuses and genre

• sounded properly tentative in their pronouncements and not overbearing or opinionated

Using these areas in a checklist, peer and self-evaluations can/should be encouraged

• after the learner hears a recording of themself

• in a Task Based lesson, after they hear how L1 users would perform in a similar situation

• after speaking activities in peer reviews

Noticing and using polite language

There should be opportunities for presentation or noticing work too: by analysing spoken samples, by looking at videos of board meetings, by reading conversational transcripts with a particular focus on aspects of discourse, for example, lexical cohesion in a text, or on knowledge speakers take for granted when they are saying something, etc.

And of course, teachers need to focus on producing speech by using scaffolded activities where learners are prompted to put politeness rules they have been made consciously aware of to unscripted and natural language use. Teachers can do this in several ways; just a few here:

• by introducing role activities where relationship and distance are made explicit

• by cueing the politeness principles in discussions through giving each participant a particular prompt, e.g. “Before your response, summarise the previous speaker’s point and make a flattering comment”, or prompts that regulate the manner and not the content of the discourse

Learning about politeness rules in spoken communication, presupposes the use of samples of language which are embedded in a context of use, preferably authentic. This does not necessarily entail long and difficult stretches of language, so the earlier we begin, the better.

As Dell Hymes (1972) said in his famous aphorism, “there are rules of use without which the rules of grammar are completely useless” and business English learners are a prime example of adults for who this information is not just important but should be in the heart of their English language learning.

Reference- Hymes, D.H. (1972). On Communicative

Competence. In J.B. Pride & J. Holmes (Eds.), Sociolinguistics (pp. 269-293). London: Penguin.