Mitigating Difficult Requests in the Workplace: What Learners and Teachers Need to Know

Abstract

m Immigrants to English-speaking countries, even those with advanced communicative skills in English, can experience misunderstanding in their workplace communication (Yates, 2005). Although such miscommunication is not restricted to those from other language backgrounds, users of English as a second or subsequent language who move to English-speaking countries as adults face particular challenges in correctly interpreting and conveying meaning. As Trosborg (2003, pp. 252-253) notes, for those from other language backgrounds, the workplace context may present challenges related not only to working in another language and culture, but also in a business culture which may well be different from the one with which they are familiar. Part of the onus for successful communication must, of course, rest with native English speakers (NESs) , and increasing their awareness of cross-cultural communication is certainly crucial. However, the often lower status newcomers to a situation cannot always depend on interacting with sympathetic interlocutors but should and can be empowered to understand the intricacies of the communicative contexts in which they are now being called on to operate. There are few descriptions that are rich enough to furnish the specifics of how adults get other people to do things in workplace situations, and many teachers feel that they do not have enough information about how NESs undertake everyday speech acts to be able to teach their learners (Yates & Wigglesworth, 2005). In particular, mitigation skills the use of linguistic and other means to soften the impact of an utterance appear difficult to learn from exposure alone (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1996), but they have considerable impact on how a speaker is perceived by interlocutors (Holmes, 1984). Mitigation skills vary considerably not only across languages but also across different Englishspeaking cultures, so it is crucial to understand more about how such skills are managed in NES interactions in order to help teachers address these skills more specifically in the classroom. This article reports on a