Abstract
This study is carried out to see if the politeness theory proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) is applicable to data elicited from EFL students attending a language institute in Iran. Students were asked to email their teacher as a class activity and make a request in an appropriate and polite form. Different viewpoints regarding the status of request in politeness perspective and also student-teacher relation in language classrooms in Iran were discussed. Based on Holtgravesand Yang’s (1992) coding scheme, email requests were analyzed and the result showed that apart from a few emails almost all the requests could be cinsidered as polite and just two of them located somewhere in the middle of scale of politeness. Since the analysis is not an absolute objective one, we can conclude that most of the students expressed their requests in a polite, formal and indirect way through long sentences as an attempt to save the negative face.
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