Teaching and Learning (Im)Politeness

Barbara Pizziconi, Miriam A. Locher, Barbara Pizziconi, Miriam A. Locher

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781501501678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This collection combines research from the field of (im)politeness studies with research on language pedagogy and language learning. It aims to engender a useful dialogue between (im)politeness theorists, language teachers, and SLA researchers, and also to broaden the enquiry to naturalistic contexts other than L2 acquisition classrooms, by formulating 'teaching' and 'learning' as processes of socialization, cultural transmission, and adaptation.

Barbara Pizziconi and Miriam A. Locher

1Introducing the ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ of (im)politeness

Abstract: This chapter outlines the editors’ conceptualization of the key terminology that gives the collection its title, such as (im)politeness, ‘teaching’ and ‘learning.’ It describes the relationship between the field of (im)politeness research and various strands of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) studies, highlights important developments in these respective domains, and advocates an enhanced dialogue between them that can lead to positive cross-fertilization. It then outlines selected issues raised in individual chapters, as well as a theme that emerged consistently across the contributions, i.e. the role of ‘awareness’; its presence or absence is seen as variously affecting individuals’ ability to achieve accurate representations of (im)politeness notions, offsetting difficulties in language learning and the development of intercultural competence, or enabling the very perception of some facets of interpersonal relationships.

Keywords: (im)politeness, second language acquisition, pragmatic transfer, interlanguage pragmatics, intercultural competence, interpersonal pragmatics

1Setting the research interface

This collection on ‘Teaching’ and ‘Learning’ (Im)Politeness (the inverted quote marks will be explained at the end of this section) combines research from the field of politeness studies with research on language pedagogy and language learning. Our aim is to fill the unfortunate gap between these research traditions in an endeavour to enrich the outlook of both constituencies, and to further engender a useful dialogue between (im)politeness theorists, language teachers, and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) researchers.

Throughout the collection, we use the term ‘(im)politeness’ as a shorthand for a broad range of semiotic phenomena which index and regulate social relations. We are interested in politeness and impoliteness phenomena and, more generally, in the interpersonal side of communication1 and its relation to ‘teaching’ and ‘learning.’ It is well known that the field of politeness has experienced a dramatic boom in the last 40 years. Studies which pioneered a scientific approach (Lakoff 1973; Leech 1983; Brown and Levinson 1978 [later reprinted and enhanced in 1987]) provided conceptual frameworks to discuss politeness as a pragmatic phenomenon; all of them attempted to highlight broad, even universal pragmatic mechanisms of production and interpretation, but at the same time had to tackle the question of culturally specific realizations which could account for variation. From the vast sea of research which set out to apply and test these frameworks in various linguistic and cultural contexts, some studies began to appear which addressed the natural pedagogical implications of this variation – e.g. how speakers of one language would go about learning and negotiating politeness in another, and whether or how politeness could be taught. However, with some exceptions, which tackled politeness issues/theory directly (House and Kasper 1981; Davies 1986; Lörscher and Schulze 1988; Geis and Harlow 1995; Meier 1997; Snow et al. 1990), the vast majority of studies which emerged from the field of second language acquisition gave politeness theory a minor role, or discussed politeness almost perforce, as (sometimes unproblematized) explanatory principles for interlanguage pragmatic difficulties, typically in speech acts realizations (e.g. Scarcella 1979; Blum-Kulka and Kasper 1989; Kasper 1992; Bouton 1995; Marriott 1995; Kasper and Schmidt 1996; Rose and Kasper 2001). The same applies to studies that looked at L1 acquisition within the field’s broader interest in language socialization and caretaker induction practices (Schieffelin and Ochs 1986; Clancy 1985; Snow et al. 1990). The applied fields of first and/or second language acquisition and language pedagogy were more concerned with the operationalization of the Hymesian concept of “communicative competence” and saw politeness as one of many indices of that competence.

Critiques and further developments in the theory of politeness which broadened the scope of research further began to appear from within the field of politeness theory in the last decade of the past century (concise reviews can be found in Pizziconi, this volume, chapter 4; Locher 2012, 2014). These developments targeted the restrictive interpretation of politeness as an abstract, a-social, pragmatic principle, and focused intensely on its socially constructed and indexical nature. Broad sociological parameters such as status differential or social distance increasingly came to be seen as overgeneralizing determinants, which were themselves subject to a great deal of subjective ‘interpretation’ and manipulation in context. Users’ variable evaluations of these categories, the negotiation of identities, positions and stances enacted in situated contexts were put under the spotlight. Politeness theory of this kind (Watts 1989, 1992; Watts et al. 1992; Eelen 2001), opened up new avenues of investigation such as the discursive nature of politeness (Watts above and 2003; Locher 2004, 2006, 2008; Locher and Watts 2005, 2008; Mills 2011) and the strategic nature of honorific usage (Pizziconi 2003; Cook 1998, 2013), the pro-social character of polite behaviour (Sifianou 1992) as well as deliberately confrontational impolite behaviour (Culpeper 1996, 2011; Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann 2003; Locher and Bousfield 2008; Bousfield 2008, 2010). These trends also showed many synergies and the contributions of different disciplinary traditions, from theories of identity to social cognition, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, and others (see Locher 2012 for a review). This interdisciplinarity is an inevitable development in view of the fact that (im)politeness considerations are always potentially triggered in communication.

Those strands of SLA with a more “sociocultural” orientation have also started to discuss (im)politeness from an increasing variety of disciplinary perspectives and in different contexts of use, beyond the language classroom. While some studies extend the previous tradition (i.e. studies of speech acts) even in recent times (Takahashi 1996; Pearson 2006; Spencer-Oatey 2000; Barron 2003; Shimizu 2009; Tateyama 2009; Felix-Brasdefer and Hasler-Barker 2012), a few also tackle (im)politeness in L2 users’ performance from newer angles: gender construction in intercultural encounters (Siegal 1994, 1995, 1996; Siegal and Okamoto 2003; Thomson and Otsuji 2003; Ishihara and Tarone 2009), self presentation and social identity (Cook 2001, 2006, 2008; Mori 2003; Iwasaki 2010); the negotiation of interactional stances in classroom contexts (Ohta 1999, 2001a, 2001b), or a number of these overlapping themes in Taguchi’s (2009) collection, as well as the role of honorific markers in children socialization (Burdelski 2013). Much less work has focused on the teaching aspect: a theoretical study (Bou Franch and Garces-Conejos Blitvich 2003), some reviews of instructional material (Matsumoto and Okamoto 2003; Brown 2010) and a few empirical studies on the effects of specific instructional treatments and metapragmatic awareness (Ishida 2009; Tateyama 2009). Incidentally, the presence of so many works on Japanese language in these new developments is not a coincidence: as noted by Kasper (2009: xiii), while work on other languages tends to focus on speech act realization, Japanese constitutes a case in which indexicals of various kinds, among which honorifics, play a conspicuous role in the communication of other meanings not necessarily related to politeness (e.g. political or affective stances, identities) in interaction. An indexical view of language can of course highlight how these meanings are achieved in honorific-poor languages (Ochs 1992; Eckert 2003) but, to the best of our knowledge, this approach has not received much attention in the pedagogical literature.

While these and other studies testify to the omnirelevance of “(im)polite” considerations in interaction, they have left only a minor mark in the field of politeness theorizing, arguably because they are driven mostly by the disciplinary interest of SLA researchers in which (im)politeness is often presented as an aspect of communicative competence development and language/culture-specific pragmatic development. With rare exceptions (e.g. Burdelski, 2013, as can be noted by the works referenced above), they are scattered in journals and volume series targeting the SLA audience. However, we understand the notions of learning and teaching in a broader sense than in the field of SLA and feel that many of the questions raised in this volume have a legitimate place in (im)politeness theorization. For example, questions regarding the affordances of different theoretical frameworks for (im)politeness pedagogy, the role of metalanguage in the development of linguistic (and sociocultural) awareness (or simply ‘maturity’), the tension between universal (innate?) vs. culture-specific aspects of (im)politeness ‘knowledge’ (cf. House 2005; further developed and revised in House 2010: 566), not to mention the translation of theoretical, scientific constructs into emically meaningful constructs – all of which are imperative questions arising from pedagogical contexts –, clearly have much broader implications which the field of (im)politeness theory ought to discuss. Moreover, especially at a time when the field of (im)politeness theorizing appears to be moving away from a purely cognitive understanding of language use to one which privileges its social dimensions, discussing matters of ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ can bring the role of the ‘social,’ or rather the ‘sociocognitive,’ right to the centre of the debate.

Indeed some scholars (e.g. Atkinson 2002: 526) have explicitly called for a more integrated view of SLA which can reconcile in one complex ecology learners and teachers, acquisitional contexts and social practices, products, and tools. The following compelling metaphor shows the advantages of a socio-cognitive perspective:

A recurring image comes to mind when I read much second language acquisition (SLA) research and theory. It is the image of a single cactus in the middle of a lonely desert – the only thing except sand for miles around. The cactus sits there, waiting patiently for that rare cloud to pass overhead and for that shower of rain to come pouring down. Like the solitary cactus, the learner in mainstream SLA research seems to sit in the middle of a lonely scene, and, like the cactus, the learner seems to wait there for life-giving sustenance (or at least its triggering mechanism) – input – to come pouring in. At that point, the real action begins, and we watch the learner miraculously grow and change.

A contrastinwg image sometimes also occurs to me, though more often when reading in fields other than SLA, such as language socialization and cultural anthropology. This is the image of a tropical rainforest, so densely packed and thick with underbrush that it would be hard to move through. This forest is constantly wet with humidity and teeming with life, sounds, growth and decay – a lush ecology in which every organism operates in complex relationship with every other organism. Each tree grows in and as a result of this fundamentally integrated world, developing continuously and being sustained through its involvement in the whole ecology. And this image satisfies me at a deeper level, because it corresponds to how I (and others) believe language acquisition “really works.” (Atkinson 2002: 525–526).

What the “tropical rainforest” scene describes, however, is no more than the conditions of language use, a flexible and adaptive process taking place constantly in the real world, an environment which language affects and is affected by (as noted in theories of indexicality and constructivism). From this perspective, language learning is another name for the “permanent process of dynamic adaptivity” (Atkinson et al. 2007:171), and hence should be the purview of any theory which deals with pragmatic, interactional phenomena.

Our intent in this collection is to foreground the relevance of ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ understood as broad labels for issues of cultural transmission and acculturation in many diverse contexts. We wish to start unpacking the multiple, sometimes unsuspected, and at times disputed social trajectories in which transmission and acculturation processes occur, and the ways in which educational contexts of various kinds reflect them. We discuss the complex relations of ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ with professional, national and cross-cultural identities and the political avenues they travel on, and also the systemic (e.g. honorifics) as well as the affective and sociocultural aspects involved. Using this broad understanding of ‘learning and teaching’ as a starting point allows us to juxtapose, under the umbrella of (im)politeness, phenomena of various kind such as L1 vs. L2 learning and socialization; pragmatic as well as metapragmatic aspects; broad policy recommendations vs. practical suggestions for classroom implementation; conceptualizations of politeness vs. impoliteness; spoken vs. signed modalities.

2Structure of the collection

The collection opens with chapters discussing (im)politeness issues in the language classroom, which focus on teaching and learning in a conventional sense (Part 1). chapter 2 addresses foreign language teachers, discusses the pros and cons of alternative methodological frameworks, and suggests general guidelines for the pedagogy of (im)politeness. Chapters 3 and 4 present classroom activities which target evaluative behaviour and report on intermediate and advanced learners’ performances, and chapter 5 ties up this first part with a commentary on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and an overview of (im)politeness-related issues in the fields of SLA and (im)politeness theory. In part 2, three more chapters (6, 7 and 8) discuss other contexts and user types – students doing a medical degree in the UK, children in Japanese household and preschool contexts, and interpreters of English/British Sign Language – and explores different modalities of ‘teaching’ and ‘learning,’ in the broad sense adopted in this collection. Finally, the epilogue gives centre stage to the discussion of impoliteness in its own right.

‘Teaching’ and ‘learning’ are of course interdependent, and although some chapters focus more specifically on one or the other, all chapters in this collection make reference to both and some address the question of their interrelation directly. Each chapter in the collection – unsurprisingly when discussing a pragmatically complex phenomenon such as (im)politeness and its learning or teaching – raises a considerable number of issues which is not possible to summarize concisely. The following overview highlights only some of these, and in particular the common evaluation of “awareness” as a crucial component of competence, or an emergent feature of linguistic development.

Spyridoula Bella, Maria Sifianou and Angeliki Tzanne’s chapter opens with the straightforward observation that if there is no such thing as an innate mechanism for generating a fully-fledged “polite competence,” then there can be little doubt that, in the L2 classroom, (im)politeness must be taught. Nevertheless, they note that the existence of quite different perspectives on the very conceptualization of (im)politeness makes decisions on how to teach it less straightforward. They outline merits and alleged demerits of existing theoretical frameworks, propose some practical guidelines for teachers, and present an example of how these can be implemented...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing the ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ of (im)politeness
• I (Im)politeness in L2 instructional contexts
• II ‘Teaching’ and ‘learning’ (about) (im)politeness in L1 and L2
• Bionotes
• Author index
• Subject index
• Endnotes