AbstractAlthough politeness markers are frequently used in written and spoken communication, pragmatic studies have not sufficiently explored the instruction of such markers to English as a foreign language (EFL) learners who lack sufficient opportunity to communicate with native speakers to acquire them in the context of use. Ignoring politeness as a subject of instruction could be due to the hypothesis that politeness is ingrained in the culture of its use and hence cannot be taught to EFL learners. To investigate this hypothesis, politeness markers proposed by House and Kasper (1981) in their politeness framework were used as the point of departure to teach these markers to two groups of EFL students using film-driven input-enhancement tasks and output tasks. The results of the study revealed the beneficial effect of teaching politeness markers through the two tasks. Whereas the input-enhancement group improved significantly in their comprehension of politeness markers, the output group manifested more gains in their production of these markers. Findings from this study have implications for interlanguage pragmatic instruction, suggesting that politeness is teachable and that different instructional tasks bring about different effects on the production and comprehension of politeness markers.
Corresponding author:Zia Tajeddin, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Allameh Tabataba’i University, South Allameh Street, Sa’adatabad, Tehran, Iran. Email: [email protected]
555357 REL0010.1177/0033688214555357RELC JournalTajeddin and Pezeshkiresearch-article2014
Article
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Politeness was first studied at the level of words and sentences; however, after advances in the fields of conversation analysis and pragmatics, it came to be examined at the dis-course level (Lakoff, 2005). Different theories were proposed for politeness as early as the 1980s by politeness researchers (e.g. Brown and Levinson, 1987). Since then, various frameworks have been suggested to classify a host of politeness markers that could be used by speakers in different situations (e.g. Bousfield, 2008; Brown and Levinson, 1987; Leech, 1983, 2005).
From a pragmatic point of view, politeness theory includes ideas such as ‘systematic rules or principles; speech acts (or utterances) as basic to language; speech as world-changing; indirectness as intentional and interpretable; the multiplicity of ways to express the same idea’ (Lakoff and Ide, 2005: 9). Like other aspects of pragmatics, it is argued that politeness can be taught to learners. Teachability of pragmatic features has been highlighted by different researchers like Alcon Soler (2005), Bardovi-Harlig (1999, 2001), Chen (2009), Cohen (2008), and Rose and Kasper (2001). Explicit instruction rather than implicit instruction has received special prominence in this respect because of the ease with which learners are able to learn pragmatic features through explicit instruction (Alcon Soler, 2005; Chen, 2009). A considerable amount of research has been conducted with regard to teaching speech acts to L2 learners to the exclusion of a spe-cific focus on politeness markers and strategies. The small number of studies conducted to teach politeness markers and strategies may be due to the presupposition that polite-ness is ingrained in the culture of the native speakers of the language and hence cannot be taught to EFL learners (Watts, 2003). However, like speech acts, implicatures, and pragmatic routines, politeness is a component of pragmatic knowledge (Yamashita, 2008) and is supposed to be teachable. To contribute to the existing insights into the acquisition of politeness in EFL contexts, this study focused on the instruction of polite-ness markers/structures through two instructional tasks: input enhancement and output.
Literature Review
Politeness Theory
Politeness markers are rooted in the theory of politeness. Politeness has been investi-gated from different perspectives: politeness as the social norm or the definition given by the lay person, politeness from a conversational maxims perspective, and politeness with a view to the concept of face (Bousfield, 2008).
The social norm perspective focuses on the conception of a lay person of the right way of behavior, which is also accepted by all the people in that society (Bousfield, 2008). Watts (2003) calls the lay person conception of politeness ‘first-order politeness’ and contends that ‘second-order politeness’ or a technical term for politeness should be con-sidered based on the theories of pragmatics and sociolinguistics since our conception of politeness as lay people is vague. Watts regards the consideration of other people’s wants as politic behavior and believes that while both politic behavior and politeness can be used to refer to people’s display of cooperative interactions in a society, impoliteness refers to a violation of politic behavior.
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Bousfield argues that the previous belief about the inadequacy of the social norm per-spective to study linguistic politeness does not seem valid any longer since it is not theo-retically possible for any approach to politeness to exclude the social norms of any society. Every approach has some reference to the social norms one way or another.
The second approach to politeness study is the conversational maxims perspective. Bousfield (2008) explains the Interpersonal Rhetoric (IR) model by Leech (1983, 2005), which consists of the Gricean Cooperative Principle (CP) and the Politeness Principle (PP). Leech believes that, while CP explains how people deviate from the norm in creat-ing an implicature, PP can explain why people do not follow the norm. These two are said to be complementary though Bousfield criticizes such a view. PP focuses on maxi-mizing polite behavior and minimizing impoliteness. PP is divided by Leech into max-ims (e.g. Tact, Generosity, and Approbation) and submaxims (positive politeness and negative politeness). He argues that some maxims are more important than others. However, his argumentation is criticized by Bousfield.
The last perspective draws on a face management point of view. This is the model proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987). Face is ‘the public self-image that every mem-ber wants to claim for himself’ (Brown and Levinson, 1987: 61) and contains two aspects: negative face and positive face. Negative face is the right of a person to be free from distractions and interference while positive face is the positive self-image that people claim for themselves and their desire to be liked by other people and to be consid-ered as a member of a group. Brown and Levinson further state that people usually try to maintain each other’s face wants and that they defend their own face in case it is threat-ened in interaction with others. They believe negative face to be formal politeness as people try not to impose anything on others while positive face is not that obvious as a form of positive politeness. They observe that certain acts are intrinsically threatening to the face of people since they challenge their wants. People may use different strategies for doing Face Threatening Acts (FTAs). The strategies include ‘on record’, ‘off record’, and ‘don’t do the FTA’.
The model proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) has been criticized by different researchers. For example, some do not agree on the ‘overstated’ universality of polite-ness by Brown and Levinson in their theory (Fraser, 2005). Fraser further mentions other criticisms to the politeness theory, some of which include its failure to pinpoint the status of politeness in pragmatics, its failure to separate the two different concepts of politeness and deference, and its failure to consider rudeness in the theory of politeness. Spencer-Oatey (2007) implicitly attends to the universality of politeness by arguing that the con-cept of face threat depends on particular interactants’ or a particular linguistic community’s face claims and face sensitivities. These claims are closely bound up with the commu-nity’s sense of sociality rights and obligations. She concludes that a clear picture of face-threatening act can be gained by considering people’s underlying conceptions of sociality rights. Bousfield (2008) also identifies other limitations of this model. For example, he mentions the inadequacy of the ‘bald, on record’ superstrategy to account for impolite-ness, no mention of the viability of positive politeness and negative politeness for ‘off-record’ category, failure ‘to account for interactant responses to face threatening/damaging impoliteness’ (Bousfield, 2008: 66) after it actually happened, lack of feed-back to the previous steps in the model by the speaker, and failure to consider the role of the audience as criticisms to Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model of politeness. Finally,
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Kádár and Mills (2011) accentuate the culture-bound and motivational nature of polite-ness. They make a contrast between politeness in Asian and European cultures, stressing that politeness of the Asians is something that millions of ‘individuals are naturally endowed with; sometimes it is also contrasted to the brashness of the Europeans or the north Americans’ (Kádár and Mills, 2011: x). They contend that even brief contact with Asians will reveal behaviors representative of various degrees on a politeness spectrum. Kádár and Mills further argue that there is cross-cultural variation in the personal motives and social purposes of ‘polite behavior.’
Later, models of impoliteness which tried to address the disadvantages of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model were proposed. One such model was developed by Culpeper (1996; for the latest version, see Culpeper, 2011), who tries to follow Brown and Levinson’s model. Culpeper’s model includes bald, on record impoliteness, positive impoliteness, negative impoliteness, sarcasm or mock politeness, and withhold polite-ness. However, Bousfield (2008) regards this model to be open ended and still suffering from the weaknesses involved in Brown and Levinson’s model. As a result, observing those weaknesses, he proposes a modified version of Culpeper’s model. This model includes ‘on record impoliteness’ and ‘off record impoliteness’, consisting of ‘sarcasm’ and ‘withhold politeness.’ Bousfield believes his model to be currently the most appropriate.
Politeness Markers
Politeness markers/structures are ‘linguistic expressions’ employed to show politeness (Watts, 2003: 182). Various structures are used by the native speakers of a language to signal politeness. Examples of these structures can be hedges (e.g. ‘sort of,’ ‘kind of,’ ‘rather’), intensifiers, politeness markers (e.g. ‘please’), and committers, all of which are used to lower the degree of imposition on the addressee (Watts, 2003).
Fewer politeness markers have been observed in non-native speakers’ interactions as compared with native interactions (Dufon, 2008). Kasper and Rose (2002) believe that learners use fewer politeness markers in early stages although they might possess enough lexical and grammatical knowledge since using pragmatically-appropriate sentences requires a control of processing which they may lack at the time.
There are different taxonomies of politeness markers such as that proposed by Holmes (2000), who classified all the markers into two groups: ‘hedges’ to lower the imposition of an utterance, and ‘boosters’ to strengthen the force of the utterance. Other taxonomies like those of Brown and Levinson (1987), Crystal and Davy (1975), and Edmondson (1977) are similar to that of Holmes in that they are limited in scope. However, the most widely cited and embracing taxonomy is the one proposed by House and Kasper (1981). Their frame-work consists of 11 markers that could be used to signal politeness. They include:
•• Politeness markers, which are expressions added to an utterance to reveal defer-ence or a request for cooperation. The most widely used examples are ‘please’ and ‘if you wouldn’t mind.’
•• Play-downs, which are devices used to reduce the perlocutionary effect which an utterance may have on the addressee. Examples include the use of past tense (e.g.
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‘I wondered if’), progressive aspect with past tense (e.g. ‘I was wondering if’), an interrogative with a modal verb (e.g. ‘I was thinking you might’), and a negative interrogative with a modal verb (e.g. ‘wouldn’t it be a good idea if’).
•• Consultative devices, which are structures which ask for a cooperative action by the addressee and involve him/her (e.g. ‘would you mind …,’ ‘could you …’).
•• Hedges, which are devices used to leave an utterance open for the addressee to impose her/his own intent by not giving an exact propositional content to the utterance (e.g. ‘kind of,’ ‘sort of,’ ‘somehow’).
•• Understaters, which are used as a means of underrepresenting the propositional content of the utterance by a phrase functioning as an adverbial modifier or also by an adverb itself (e.g. ‘a bit, a little bit, a second’).
•• Downtoners, which modulate the impact of the speaker’s utterance (e.g. ‘just, simply, possibly’).
•• Committers, which are devices employed to lower the extent to which the speaker commits her/himself to the propositional content of the utterance (e.g. ‘I think, I believe’).
•• Forewarning, which are used by the speaker to make a metacomment on an FTA using different kinds of structures or to flout a widely accepted principle (e.g. ‘far be it for me to criticize, but …’).
•• Hesitators, which are used to fill pauses with non-lexical phonetic material (e.g. ‘er,’ ‘uhh,’ ‘ah’).
•• Scope-staters, which are devices used by the speaker to state a subjective opinion about what is being said (e.g. ‘I’m afraid you’re in my seat,’ ‘I’m disappointed that you couldn’t’).
•• Agent avoiders, which are structures used to avoid talking about the agent of an action and so deflecting the criticism from the addressee to some generalized agent by using passive structures or sentences like ‘people don’t do X’ (Watts, 2003: 184).
There is a need for pragmatic competence in all these markers, i.e. learners will not be prepared to use these markers unless they know about their pragmalinguistic realizations and their sociopragmatic appropriateness.
Research on Politeness Markers
A number of studies, mainly descriptive in nature, have been conducted on different aspects of politeness in general and politeness markers in particular. These studies have examined the perceptions of politeness by learners of different genders and cultural backgrounds (Ahmadian and Vahid Dastjerdi, 2010; Chang, 2008, Niroomand, 2012), the different uses of politeness strategies (negative or positive) by EFL learners (Nash, 1983), e-politeness in native and nonnative communications (Biesenbach-Lucas, 2007; Knupsky and Nagy-Bell, 2011), and the realization of politeness in different speech acts like apology, refusal, and disagreement (Behnam and Niroomand, 2011; Kana, 1982; Tamimi Sa’d and Mohammadi, 2014; Ülbeği, 2009) and in advertisements (Pishghadam and Navari, 2012). Other descriptive studies have analyzed the interactions in the
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workplace (Holmes, 2000) and the realization of politeness in political discourse (Harris, 2001) for politeness markers and strategies used.
Chang (2008) studied the perceptions of politeness by two learners of different cul-tural backgrounds (an Australian learner and a Taiwanese Chinese learner) and different genders. He found of learners with different cultural backgrounds had different percep-tions of politeness and used contrasting politeness strategies in order to make apologies in their conversations. Chang further argued that communication breakdowns that occur between speakers may be the result of a difference in cultural backgrounds. The findings from this study were inconclusive as far as gender was concerned. Focusing on refusal, Ülbeği (2009) explored the effect of instruction (implicit vs. explicit) given in a second language classroom on the acquisition of polite refusals in American English by a group of 8th grade Turkish primary school students. Results of qualitative and quantitative analysis indicated that both implicit and explicit instruction facilitated the acquisition of polite refusals. However, implicit instruction produced a significantly better effect than explicit instruction.
In his study of the use of politeness markers by American and Chinese participants, Nash (1983) concluded, based on Brown and Levinson’s taxonomy of politeness mark-ers, that although his American participants used more negative politeness strategies, the Chinese used more positive politeness strategies which were in line with their lifestyles. However, the researcher believes that the use of politeness markers is ‘situation-specific’ rather than culture-specific (Nash, 1983: 87).
In her mixed-method research, Biesenbach-Lucas (2007) examined the emails native and non-native students sent to faculty members in order to investigate how students made requests. She found that students used more direct request strategies than indirect ones and that native speakers created more polite e-mails to their professors than non-native students. In another study, Tamimi Sa’d and Mohammadi (2014) investigated the politeness strategies in the speech act of apology employed by Iranian EFL learners. The findings indicated that, in terms of native speaker ratings, 30% of apology utterances produced by EFL learners were polite, 44.5% were partially polite, and 25.5% were impolite. The researchers also found that the participants drew on negative and positive politeness strategies when they apologized. From the findings, they concluded that Iranian EFL learners had partial sociolinguistic competence in apology.
Against this backdrop, it seems that no research has been conducted specifically on teaching politeness markers and structures to EFL learners through different methods of language learning. All the research done in the literature focused on the description of the strategies used by native or nonnative speakers and the markers and structures observed in their speech or writing. To close this gap in the literature was the main motivation behind the present study.
Purpose of the Study
Politeness should be learned since it is not something inborn (Watts, 2003). As Watts points out, some researchers contend that politeness cannot be taught since it is a culturally defined phenomenon that native speakers naturally have. However, the possibility of prag-matic instruction has received support from a number of scholars (Alcon Soler, 2005;
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Bardovi-Harlig, 2001; Chen, 2009; Cohen, 2008; Rose and Kasper, 2001); hence, as a component of pragmatic knowledge (Yamashita, 2008), politeness is hypothesized to be learnable in an EFL context.
In view of the possibility of the teachability of politeness, the purpose of this study was two-fold. The first purpose was to examine whether the instruction of politeness markers to EFL learners would be effective. The second purpose was to investigate whether the two methods of instruction used in this study (input-enhancement and out-put) could produce different results in the EFL learners’ comprehension and production of politeness markers. To this end, two research questions were addressed:
1. Do input-enhancement and output tasks differ significantly in developing the EFL learners’ comprehension of politeness markers?
2. Do input enhancement and output tasks differ significantly in developing the EFL learners’ production of politeness markers?
Method
Participants
Participants of this study included 61 upper-intermediate EFL students who had been studying the New Interchange series (Richards et al., 2005) in private English institutes for at least three years. All of them were female, with their ages ranging from 13 to 20. They were non-native speakers of English and did not have any experience of living in an English-speaking country. The participants were in four intact classes which were ran-domly assigned to either output or input-enhancement experimental groups. There were 30 participants in the output group and 31 in the input-enhancement group. However, one participant from the output group and four from the input-enhancement group did not take the post-test, so they were excluded from the final analysis of the data. The administration of the politeness pretest showed that the two groups were homogeneous in terms of their knowledge of politeness markers before they received the treatments.
Instruments and Instructional Materials
The Politeness Pretest: Six conversations were taken from the books Functions of American English (Jones, 1983) and International Expressways (Molinsky, 1989) since they lent themselves to House and Kasper’s framework of politeness markers more effectively than the other books investigated (such as the Top Notch series and the American English File series) and included all the markers present in the taxonomy. However, some of the original conversations were long and ran the risk of making the students tired of reading and finishing the test. Hence, they were shortened, but care was taken not to omit the information-laden turns. Thirty sentences from among all the sen-tences which included the target politeness markers were chosen to be included in the test. The sentences were numbered, underlined, and made bold for the students. Eighteen sentences were changed by the researchers who either removed politeness markers
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completely or changed some of the words to make the sentences less appropriate. The other 12 sentences remained intact.
In the final version of the pretest, the 30 items representing more and less polite mark-ers were included in random order. While the 18 inappropriate items did not embody the markers in House and Kasper’s (1981) taxonomy (i.e. politeness markers, play-downs, consultative devices, hedges, understaters, downtoners, committers, forewarning, hesita-tors, scope-stators, and agent avoiders), the other 12 sentences included these markers. The participants were given these conversations and an answer sheet which included a five-point Likert scale, ranging from ‘extremely impolite’ to ‘totally polite,’ to measure their comprehension of the degree of (im)politeness of each sentence. One item from the pretest is given below:
Bob: Well, what do you think of this, Mary? Do you like this restaurant?Mary: oh, honey, it looks very nice. Oh, look, let’s see if we can sit over there by
the window so we can look at the water!Bob: oh yeah, sure. (1) We want to have a table over there by the window.Waitress: (2) Nuh, I’m sorry, we’re closing that section. (3) Sit over here.Mary: Oh … oh, all right, sure.
The Politeness Post-test: The same conversations as those used in the politeness pretest were given to the participants for the post-test. However, in the politeness post-test, the participants were required both to choose a number from the five-point Likert scale and to modify the sentences they thought were impolite or not suitable for the situ-ation to make them more polite in the spaces provided to them. The following is part of the post-test:
Bob: Hello. (26) I want to speak with Larry.Mr. Smith: (27) I’m afraid Larry isn’t here at the moment. (28) I take your
message.Bob: Yes. This is his friend Bob calling. (29) Ask him to bring a few bottles
Instructional Materials: House and Kasper’s proposed politeness markers were divided into six groups and were taught to the participants during six sessions. The mark-ers were categorized based on their appearance in the films since the sessions were
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sequenced on the basis of the units in the film book. Thus, those markers which appeared in the film each session were taught. The six sessions were focused on play-downs and consultative devices (session 1), forewarning and scope-staters (session 2), understaters and agent avoiders (session 3), committers and hesitators (session 4), politeness markers and downtoners (session 5), and hedges (session 6). For each category, examples were also provided to the participants.
Furthermore, the films from New Interchange 3 (Richards et al., 2005) were tran-scribed. Six units which included the politeness markers in House and Kasper’s frame-work were chosen to instruct the two groups. The units were based on six topics: Kid Sister, Bigfoot, Heartbreak Hotel, Stress Relief, If Only…, and Car Trouble. Each session was devoted to one of the six topics, and each film transcript was paired with the polite-ness markers for the session.
Data Collection Procedure
The present study lasted for five weeks. The first and last weeks were allocated to the pre-test and post-test and three weeks were devoted to the instruction of politeness markers in each group. Instructional materials were presented in six sessions (two ses-sions per week). The participants in the two groups were given the politeness pre-test the first week before they received their pertinent instruction. They were asked to read the five conversations in their pre-test and choose one point in the scale from ‘extremely impolite’ to ‘totally polite’ for each highlighted sentence. One week after the pre-test, the instruction started.
In the output group, a thorough explanation was given to the learners regarding polite-ness markers in English. Whenever necessary, the instructor resorted to some examples in the learners’ first language for ease of understanding. Then, the learners were given a copy of two politeness markers and the examples which were provided under each cat-egory. For example, session one included play-downs as politeness markers. Therefore, the learners were given the following explanation and examples:
Play-downs: Syntactic devices or grammatical structures that make the force of the speaker’s sentence less.
•• Past tense (I wondered if …I thought you might …)• Example 1: I wondered if you could help me out with my physics exam.• Example 2: I thought you might enjoy watching a movie tonight.
More examples were given by the instructor in case the learners had problems under-standing the markers. After the markers were explained and examples were provided under each category, the learners were given the film transcripts for the movie Kid Sister and were asked to follow the sentences while they were listening to the people talking in the movie. Nothing was highlighted in the text since the purpose was to focus on learn-ers’ production after they had received instruction. After they watched the film following the lines, they were required to put aside the film transcript. The instructor wrote the sentences used in the movie on the board with some changes to remove the target
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markers taught in that session. The learners were then required to change the sentences to make them more polite. They could refer to the markers and examples they were taught in that session, but they were not allowed to look at the film transcript. After the instructor collected the participants’ papers, she provided the polite form to them so that they could compare their own answers with it. The treatment in the output group contin-ued likewise for five more sessions with the learners receiving the copies of the markers together with explanations and examples and then watching the other films − Bigfoot, Heartbreak Hotel, Stress Relief, If Only …, and Car Trouble − while looking at the tran-scripts. In every session they practiced revising the sentences on the board to make them more polite.
The participants in the input-enhancement group received the same initial instruc-tion on politeness markers and some relevant examples each session. The difference between the output group and this group was the treatment with the films. The target markers for each session were highlighted in the transcripts given to the learners in the input-enhancement group to make the points more salient to them and to help ‘raise the learners’ consciousness’ (Eslami and Eslami-Rasekh, 2008). The learners in this group were not required to practice the markers since they were not supposed to perform any output-based tasks after they had watched the films. Therefore, they were exposed to the same conversation in the Kid Sister film but written in boldface, as described below:
Abby: Yeah, that’s why I’m calling. Would you mind if she stayed with you? It would only be for tonight. I’ll pick her up tomorrow morning by 10:00 o’clock?
Renee: No, I wouldn’t mind at all. But could you ask her to bring something to entertain herself while I’m working on my report?
The treatment in the input-enhancement group continued likewise while the partici-pants followed the lines and highlighted politeness markers in the film transcripts every session after they had been taught the markers and the relevant examples.
One week after the treatment in both groups, the politeness post-test was given to the participants. They were required to read the conversations and for each highlighted sen-tence choose one point in the scale from ‘extremely impolite’ to ‘totally polite’ on the five-point Likert scale. They were then required to revise those sentences they believed to be impolite or not suitable to the situation to make them more polite.
Data Analysis
Five raters were asked to rate the 30 sentences developed for the pretest. The raters, who had been teaching English for at least five years, were given the original sentences in the conversations to help them in their judgments. They were asked to rate the sentences on a five-point scale from extremely impolite to totally polite. For each of the sentences, the choice which three or four of the raters agreed upon was considered as the most appropri-ate answer. As a result, the students’ pre-test and post-test papers were scored based on
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the raters’ agreed-upon ratings. There were 30 sentences, so the maximum score for this section of the test was 30.
The modified sentences written by the students for the post-test were also rated on a scale from 1 to 5. Since six of the sentences received a rating of 5 by the raters, only 25 of the sentences could be further changed by the students. It follows that a maximum score of 125 could be gained for this section of the post-test.
Results and Discussion
To have homogeneous participants in the input-enhancement and output groups, a comprehension test of politeness markers was given to the students in the two groups. The results of the descriptive analyses of the pre-test data for the two groups appear in Table 1. As can be seen in this table, the mean scores of the input-enhancement and the output groups were 8.9 and 9.9 and their standard deviations were 2.9 and 3.6, respectively.
To make sure the two groups were homogeneous prior to the implementation of the study, an Independent-Samples t-test was used. The result of the t-test applied to the pretest scores of the two groups appears in Table 2. It revealed no significant difference between the two groups (t (54) =1.17, p<.05).
The post-test was scored separately for the post-test comprehension (Post-test C) scores of the students. The descriptive statistics for the post-test scores of the two groups can be seen in Table 3. As the table shows, the mean scores of the input-enhancement group greatly improved after the treatment.
Table 1. Descriptive Statistics for the Pretest Scores of Groups.
To answer the first research question, an Independent-Samples t-test was run on the post-test comprehension scores of the two groups to explore whether any of the two groups improved significantly after their respective instructions. The result of the test (Table 4) revealed a significant difference between the two groups with the input-enhancement group outperforming the output groups (t (54)=3.22, p<.05). Therefore, the findings related to the first research question clearly show the advantage of the input-enhancement task over the output task.
Although the input-enhancement group outperformed the output group in the compre-hension section of the post-test, the results were quite the opposite for the production section of the test. Table 5 displays the descriptive statistics for the post-test production scores of the two groups. As can be seen from the table, the output group had remarkably more gains in production than the input-enhancement group.
An Independent-Samples t-test was conducted with the post-test scores of the two groups for the production part of the test. The results appear in Table 6, showing that the output group performed significantly better than the input-enhancement group (t (54)=8.88, p<.05). Thus, there was a significant difference between the performances of the two groups as far as the production of politeness markers is concerned.
To depict the performance of the learners in changing the sentences in the production post-test to make them more polite, the samples below can be revealing:
Table 4. The Results of the Independent-Samples t-test for the Post-test Comprehension Scores of Input-enhancement and Output Groups.
In item 8 below, some of the learners considered the waitress’s response to be impolite and instead offered sentences like ‘I think you could order the steak’ and ‘You could pos-sibly order the steak.’ As these changes show, they used two types of politeness markers to make the sentence more appropriate: ‘possibly’ as a downtoner and ‘I think’ as a committer.
Bob: Uh-huh. Well, if you were going to be eating here yourself, what a … what would you have? What’s really good?
Waitress: (8) Order the steak.
Another example is item 3 given below. In response to Bob’s request, the waitress said, ‘Sit over there.’ The learners changed the sentence into a more polite one by suggesting ‘Please sit over here’ or ‘Would you sit over here?’ These two sentences manifest the use of ‘please’ and ‘would you’ as a politeness marker and a consultative device, respectively.
Bob: oh yeah, sure. (1) We want to have a table over there by the window.Waitress: (2) Nuh, I’m sorry, we’re closing that section. (3) Sit over here.
There were also instances of misjudgements. An instance of misjudgement by the learners and inappropriate correction can be observed in item 27. While the majority of the learners rated sentence 27 as totally polite, a few of them considered the sentence as impolite and corrected it inappropriately. In their misrepairs, they offered sentences like ‘I’m sorry I’m afraid Larry isn’t here at the moment.’
Bob: Hello. (26) I want to speak with Larry.Mr. Smith: (27) I’m afraid Larry isn’t here at the moment. (28) I take your
message.Unlike the previously held belief that politeness is ingrained in the culture of the
native speakers of the language and cannot be taught to EFL learners (Watts, 2003), the results of this study show that politeness can be taught and that different methods of instruction might produce differential results as to the comprehension and production of politeness markers.
The first research question was aimed at investigating the difference between input-enhancement and output tasks in helping EFL learners improve their comprehension of politeness markers. As was shown by the results of the analysis, the input-enhancement group outperformed the output group in the comprehension of politeness markers. The input group did not practice the markers during the sessions in the classroom and was only exposed to them. These gains were achieved despite lack of practice and direct involvement with the markers and how they could be used in different situations.
One strong reason for the outperformance of the input-enhancement group might be the consciousness-raising brought about though the highlighting of politeness markers in the input-enhancement task. Enhanced input focused the attention of the learners in the input-enhancement group on a specific target structure, i.e. politeness markers. Although Sharwood Smith (1991), who coined the term ‘input enhancement,’ argues
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that we do not know what effect enhanced input has on the learner, Ellis’s (2012) review of studies on various types of form-focused instruction shows that enhanced input ‘involving text highlighting of features has … been found to promote noticing and to assist acquisition’ (Ellis, 2012: 289). This effect has been substantiated in a number of studies. For instance, Jourdenais et al. (1995) found that imperfect verb forms were more likely to be used in a narrative writing task if the L2 learner had previously read the texts with highlighted verb forms. Another reason might be the impact of combined explicit instruction and input enhancement. In this study, input enhancement was pre-ceded by explanation about politeness markers. The effect of this combination has also been observed in the study conducted by Williams and Evans (1998) on the acquisition of participial adjectives and present passive. The third reason concerns the nature of the task following treatment in the two groups. One of the issues in the studies on treatment effects is the match/mismatch or the degree of correspondence between treatment task and assessment task. As the task in the comprehension post-test of politeness markers required the recognition of the degree of politeness in the underlined sentences in con-versations, it had a more inextricable link to the treatment in the input-enhancement group, which aimed to enhance understanding rather than production of the target fea-ture (politeness markers).
Overall, the results of the comprehension-based test of politeness markers support Simard’s (2009) findings with regard to the beneficial effects of input enhancement. He used a variety of textual enhancement techniques to investigate their effects on the students’ intake and found that textual enhancement techniques produced different beneficial effects as far as the test format was concerned. On the other hand, Tateyama (2009) believes that the effect of implicit instruction through input enhancement is either limited in research or less than that of explicit instruction through metaprag-matic teaching. This belief is not supported by the results of this study. Furthermore, although Kupferberg (1999) contends that explicit instruction together with input enhancement can focus the learners’ attention on comprehension- and production-based tasks, the students in the input-enhancement group improved only in their com-prehension of politeness markers.
The second research question focused on the difference between input-enhancement and output tasks in improving the EFL learners’ production of politeness markers. The results of the analysis revealed an advantage for the production of the markers by the output group. These results were expected to some extent since the students in the output group were directed toward using the markers in the activities they performed in each session and hence learned how to use such markers and how to change impolite or less polite sentences to the more polite ones. However, this group manifested an overempha-sis on the use of markers, as was observed in their ratings of the sentences. Most of the learners in this group underrated the sentences, i.e. they tended to select the ‘extremely impolite’ end of the scale even when the sentences were completely polite. As a result, their rating was not compatible with the one given by the five raters. It seems that they considered the sentences as polite only if they could find enough politeness markers in them. This tendency was also reflected in the sentences they changed. Even those sen-tences which were assigned a rating of 5 by the raters were changed to include more politeness markers.
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Task effectiveness evidenced in this study is in line with many studies which have shown the beneficial effects of output on different aspects of the learners’ language (e.g. Benati, 2001; Suzuki and Itagaki, 2007; Webb, 2005). Benati (2001), for example, found positive effects of the output tasks even in a delayed post-test. Besides, the result of this study confirms Suzuki and Itagaki’s (2007) findings. They examined the students’ output production with regard to two types of tasks (translation and scrambled sentences), which substantiated the Output Hypothesis. Webb (2005) states that receptive instruction of vocabulary can lead to receptive knowledge while the productive learning of words leads to productive vocabulary. Although his results are from the studies he did on the acquisition of vocabulary, the present study supports his idea concerning the comprehen-sion and production of politeness markers.
Conclusion
In view of the findings, it should be concluded that the instruction of politeness mark-ers could be beneficial to EFL learners. Since EFL students do not have sufficient opportunity to communicate with native speakers, they might not improve in their pragmatic knowledge in line with their grammatical competence. Politeness and polite-ness markers as a subcomponent of pragmatic knowledge may be teachable and differ-ent methods of instruction may affect either the comprehension or production of politeness markers.
However, as discussed in second language acquisition studies, instructional tasks vary in their impact on the acquisition of target structures. In line with many SLA studies, findings from this study show that different tasks entail different kinds of cognitive engagement and hence lead to different levels of acquisition. While input-oriented tasks, such as input enhancement, enhance the learners’ noticing of target features, which may improve comprehension, they may fall short of bringing significant gains in the produc-tion of these target features. The differential effects of input enhancement on the compre-hension and production of politeness markers in this study reveal variation in task effects. By contrast, the enhancement of the ability to produce politeness markers as a result of output tasks reinforces the conclusion that output, as Swain (1995, 1998, 2003) claimed, leads to improved reflection on the form and function of a target feature, which benefits later production. It follows from the differential effects of input and output tasks on the acquisition of politeness markers that output tasks are more advantageous than input tasks in improving pragmatic production.
The results of this study offer implications for teachers and for teaching politeness markers. Teachers are advised to help learners enhance their pragmatic competence by drawing on different methods of teaching pragmatic features such as the use of polite-ness markers. The results of the studies done in pragmatics revealed that teaching L2 pragmatic features is both necessary and effective because of the small amount of pragmatic input students have access to in a foreign language context and that explicit instruction is usually more beneficial to learners than implicit instruction (Alcon Soler and Martinez-Flor, 2008). Teachers may help their learners by using different approaches, such as input-enhancement or output tasks, to improve their comprehen-sion or production of politeness markers. As revealed by the results of the present
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study, politeness markers can be taught and different methods of teaching produce differential effects. L2 learners can benefit from different methods to enhance their acquisition of politeness principles, including the comprehension and production of politeness markers.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
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