A comparative study into acquisition of politeness in English as a foreign language

Abstract This study investigated the acquisition of pragmatics of the learners learning English as a second language through politeness level achieved in the production of request speech act. It also aimed to find different ways that may contribute to language teaching in teaching politeness. To achieve this, a discourse completion task, which consists of two types of situations: familiar and unfamiliar, was designed and implemented to 21 upper intermediate and 31 advanced students. The data were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively using the analysis of speech act data, CCSARP coding system by Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989). The study revealed that the foreign language learners tended to use conventional indirect speech act rather than direct and nonconventional speech acts and that students' awareness of familiarity in the situations made them change the grammatical form. It was also found that upper intermediate learners employed more modification to mitigate their utterances. In addition, they used less direct but more conventional indirect strategies. Another conclusion was that native and non-native speakers of English perceived politeness in quite a different way and even the native speakers' perception of politeness differed. Considering the ratings of the native and non-native speakers of English, the learners were found to be moderately polite in their utterances.