Raising Students’ Awareness about Linguistic Politeness and its Impacts on Social Interactions

Abstract

Communication is an art that needs to be mastered, people communicate to express their thoughts and exchange ideas. Politeness is a key factor that lead people to successful interactions and to form effective speakers. In essence, using politeness strategies helps interlocutors to be effective speakers and to mitigate all kinds of misunderstandings that occurs in a goal-oriented communication. This study promotes politeness and describes the importance of using politeness strategies as well as their positive impacts on social interactions. The linguistic model used in conducting this research is the one provided by Brown and Levinson (1987): the face-saving theory strategies. The purpose of this investigation is to investigate to what extent L3 students and MA2 students in the department of English Language, University Abdelhamid Ibn Badis are aware of being polite in a goal-oriented interaction, secondly, to explore which politeness strategies the students use to express politeness, thirdly, to discover the importance of politeness and its impacts on social interactions, lastly, to suggest teaching politeness theory to students in licence degree in order to make sure they learn about politeness sufficiently and use politeness strategies appropriately. The research method that were chosen to conduct this study is the qualitative research method; to collect reliable data, questionnaire and scenarios are adopted for this research. The results show that students are aware of using politeness and of its importance on a goal-oriented social interaction as well as on society by creating a safe environment for communicating, furthermore, the findings reveal that the participants use mostly the same politeness strategies in order to express politeness.