Primary pre-service teachers’ awareness of politeness in English requests

Abstract

Politeness in English requests is associated with particular linguistic features such as mood, tense, negation, modals, and lexical markers. This study investigates the extent to which primary pre-service teachers are aware of English syntactic or lexical features that increase or decrease the degree of politeness in communicative interactions. Pre-service teachers (n = 42) and English natives (n = 15) as a reference group were asked to rate the degree of politeness of twenty request forms which vary across five linguistic features (mood, tense, negation, lexical markers, and suggestives). Analysis of the questionnaire revealed that the majority of the pre-service teachers are unaware of pragmalinguistics of English politeness, showing significantly different response patterns from the reference group. Specifically, they underestimated the effects of mood distinctions (imperatives vs. interrogatives) and negation on politeness while overestimating the contributions of the politeness marker, please, and the past tense modal verb, could, to politeness. Some causes of their limited pragmalinguistic knowledge are discussed, and some suggestions are made for pre-service teacher education to foster their pragmatic competence.