Politeness in Study Abroad

ABSTRACT:The concept of politeness as an important notion in the study of human interaction had been originally introduced in the field of sociology and later was extended in the areas of discourse analysis and pragmatics. Using Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness, the present longitudinal study examined the development of proficiency in politenessover time pertain to the use of request and apology speech acts in the Iranian intermediate English language learners in a study abroad program in India. A group of 72 learners were given a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) with 16 scenarios for request and 10 situations for apology at three times interval (at the beginning of the program as pre-test, after three months as post-test 1, and finally after six months as post-test 2). A quantitative analysis of the elicited data indicates a degree of improvement in politeness across the three tests. The findings in this study support that, length of stay in abroad has a positive impact on learners’ achievement in L2 norms of politeness regarding the illocutionary domainof speech acts namely, requests and apologies.