A study of politeness strategies in the conversational activities of the coursebook "New Headway" pre-intermediate(The third edition)

Abstract

Nowadays, when language serves as a means of communication, English has become indispensable means of international communication. Everybody wants to learn and use English for various purposes. However, a large proportion of Vietnamese students have not yet been successful in communication as they may fail to understand the conversation or cannot express exactly what they want to. Awareness of politeness strategies used in language is then a suitable way to help students be more successful in every day conversations. This study is to focus on positive and negative politeness strategies in conversations of the course book “New Headway Pre-Intermediate (The Third Edition)”, with an aim to help the students at Thang Long University improve their awareness of positive and negative politeness strategies in conversational activities in the course book mentioned above, thus to apply these strategies in their everyday conversations in English. In the course book “New Headway Pre-Intermediate (The Third Edition)”, typical conversation activities are classified into “Requesting”, “Making suggestions”, “Inviting” and “Social behaviors” and then analyzed mainly in the light of the politeness theories of Brown & Levinson and Nguyen Quang. The research shows that the frequency of positive and negative politeness strategies depends not only on the purpose of the interactions but also on the relationship between speakers and hearers in communication. Last but not least, some suggestions for learning and teaching positive and negative politeness strategies are also presented.