Research on teacher’s language in L2 classroom, accordingly, has a long tradition. There are growing appeals for teacher’s politeness strategies and recent studies into teacher’s politeness strategies have been conducted in different context and with a wide range of participants, from high school teachers to college ones.
Jiang (2010) investigated teacher’s linguistic politeness in EFL classroom. His study had a case study design whose participants were one Chinese teacher and the students. In Jiang’s study, the teacher’s politeness strategies were seen in respect to the process of teaching and learning activities such as instruction, motivating the class, evaluating the students and classroom management. Follows is the classification of teacher’s politeness strategies in the classroom:
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1) Giving instructions, e.g. “Let’s begin our class”, “Shall we move to the topic of the text?”, or “This question is kind of difficult. Please think carefully.”
2) Motivating, e.g. “Why don’t you …” “Maybe you can correct this sentence”, or
“You can give it a try”
3) Evaluating/Giving feedback, e.g. “Excellent”, “Good job”, or “Well done, Ms X”
4) Managing classroom, e.g. “Would you please stop talking?”, “Please come here”
or “Can you sit here?”
(Jiang, 2010)
Moreover, from classroom observation, interview with participants and data analysis, the author was able to draw a conclusion that politeness strategy existed in ELF classroom. Specifically, positive and negative politeness strategies were recognized mostly through teacher’s activities of motivating and evaluating the students. This means the teacher took in his consideration the students’ desire to be liked or approved. As a result, these strategies significantly promoted teacher-students relationship, further, enhanced teaching and benefited student’s learning process. Meanwhile, bald-on record strategies were seen through the speech act of classroom management, which indicates a close relationship between the teacher and his students.
In his case study analysis, Zaenul (2014) claimed that teacher and students utilized all the politeness strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) during their learning process in EFL context. The participants on his research were one teacher and twenty-eight students at grade 11. His research method took the form of observation in ‘natural setting’, which aimed at not interfering the teaching-learning process. The result from Zaenul’s study revealed that among the four types of politeness strategy, positive politeness strategy was often utilized the most in L2 classroom. He further asserted that teachers attempt to be fun and friendly to the students. It was merely to minimize the threat (FTA) or imposition. In other words, that the teacher
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attempted to creates a close relationship with the students in the classroom would automatically influence the studens’ learning process. In this case, the students not only enjoyed the class but also respected their teacher during the teaching and learning process. However, since the author’s interpretation solely based on his observation, the conclusion was probably subjective and might fail to capture the nature of the teacher-student interaction. The in-class occurrences ought to be analyzed through the lenses of the teacher and the students, in other words.
A similar pattern of result was obtained by Mahmud (2017). The author conducted a descriptive qualitative study, whose participants were a secondary teacher and her students in English class. The results collected through audio recording, observation checklist and interview enabled the author to conclude that teachers use positive politeness strategy the most dominantly in their EFL classroom, further, this strategy helped create a good communication between the teachers and their student. In this study, there was no evidence of off-record strategy used in the class; however, there was no conclusion drawn from such phenomenon.
In line with previous studies, Yoga and her co-authors (2018) also conducted a study investigating on the implication of politeness strategies in teaching-learning process between one high school teacher and her grade-10 students. By means of observation and interview, the author got more insights on the stated iressue. Specifically, the research result showed the significant influence of teacher’s politeness strategy on the following aspects in EFL classroom: efficiency in the process of learning and teaching, respect communication between teacher and students, less imposition and directness in teaching-learning process, and more ‘togetherness’ between teacher and students.
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In brief, a growing body of literature has examined teacher’s politeness strategies in EFL classroom as well as the correlation between such strategies and teacher-student interaction during the teaching-learning process.
Nevertheless, little study to date has examined the use of teacher’s politeness strategies in EFL classroom at university level in the context of Vietnam. Besides, much of the research merely focuses on teachers’ politeness recognized through teachers’ utterances without studying students’ perception towards these utterances. Students’ perception on the appropriateness and effectiveness of teacher’s utterances in EFL classroom is still under-researched, in other words. Therefore, a study to investigate Vietnamese college teacher’s politeness strategy and students’ perception on the teacher’s utterances in EFL classroom would be a major contribution to the research field of L2 teacher language.
2.8. Chapter summary
This chapter presented the theoretical issues relevant to the study including the theory of linguistic politeness in general and Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness strategy in particular. The framework for the study as well as a critical appraisal of the previous studies related to the current research were also presented at the end of the chapter.
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