Process of EFL Learners’ Politeness Markers Development: A Sociocultural Perspective

Abstract

In spite of the crucial function of the politeness markers in the appropriate communication of the language learners, teachability of these markers has not received due attention in the pragmatic studies. Drawing upon House and Kasper's (1981) influential taxonomy of politeness markers, the present study addressed teachability as well as the underlying process or microgenetic development of these markers in an EFL context. A population of 56 undergraduate participants underwent instruction through consciousness-raising (C-R) tasks for nine sessions. The data were obtained through repeated measurements during the first, third, fifth, seventh, and ninth sessions. The findings highlighted the effectiveness of the politeness markers instruction and suggested that the learners' heavy reliance on some structures like “please" and consultative devices such as “willingness" and “ability" structures at early stages of data collection was mostly due to their unawareness of other politeness structures. This reliance decreased over time and was replaced by “play-downs" especially “progressive aspect + past tense" structure in the course of the instruction.Likewise, a wider range of simple politeness markers such as hedges, understaters, and downtoners which were absent in the learners' early data increased steadily in their subsequent data. The findings highlight the acquisitional difficulty of pragmatic features and provide researchers, practitioners as well as language learners with information concerning the acquisitional sequence and order of pragmatic features in an EFL instructional context.