PE41 : The Analysis of Politeness Strategies and Conversational Implicatures in EFL learners’ Classroom Interaction
Thesis > Central Library of Shahrood University > Industrial Engineering & Management > MSc > 2021
Authors:
[Author], Seyed Hamzeh Mousavi[Supervisor], Seyyed Ali Ostovar-Namaghi[Advisor]
Abstarct: This study attempts to analyze the politeness strategies and conversational implicatures as two major pragmatic issues in Iranian student-teacher oral interactions at EFL online classrooms. In EFL classrooms, language is largely used as a means of learning rather than a tool of communication. As a result of this educational deficiency, the language learners become linguistically competent but communicatively incompetent. Within the frxamework of communicative skills, pragmatic features such as politeness strategies and conversational implicatures are key factors in building effective and appropriate communications. For this purpose, a descxriptive-analytical approach was conducted in this study to investigate these concepts. The data were collected from 9 upper intermediate students and the video of their conversation was recorded. The gathered data were analyzed within the theoretical frxamework of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness strategies and the Gricean cooperative principle. Our data demonstrated that the students used all four types of politeness strategies including positive politeness, negative politeness, off-record and bald on-record, among which the positive strategies that rely on claiming a common ground like seeking agreement were frequent in their interactions. The factors which influenced their choice of these strategies were mainly expressing sympathy, fulfilling respect, reducing face-threatening actions and strengthening affinity. This means that the participants behaved quite politely in the classroom. Moreover, related to flouting Grecian’s maxims, the students flouted all four types of maxims including the maxim of manner, quantity, relevance, and quality. Low lexico-grammatical proficiency, friendly atmosphere of the classroom and the teacher’s expectation of the learners to talk more were the main purposes in which the students flouted the maxim of manner and quantity commonly. Moreover, in a few cases, the students flouted the maxims to reach politeness. By doing this, they aimed at reducing the face-threatening actions and raising intimacy between interlocutors. The findings of the study have implications for language teachers, learners and curriculum developers.
Keywords:
#Politeness strategies #Gricean conversational maxims #Iranian EFL learners #Classroom interaction Keeping place: Central Library of Shahrood University
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