VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES VU THI THANH HUYEN A Study on Politeness Strategies in the Conversations of the Coursebook “Top Notch 2” Pre-intermediate (the First Edition) Nghiên cứu về chiên lược lich sự trong các bai hội thoại của (phiên bản đầu tiên) M. MINOR THESIS Field: English Linguistics Code: 60.15 HANOI- 2013 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES VU THI THANH HUYEN A Study on Politeness Strategies in the Conversations of the Coursebook “Top Notch 2” Pre-intermediate (the First Edition) Nghiên cứu về chiên lược lich sự trong các bai hội thoại của đầu tiên) M. MINOR THESIS Field: English Linguistics Code: 60.15 Supervisor: DO THI THANH HA, Ph. Hanoi, 2013 DECLARATION I hereby certify that the thesis entitled A Study on Politeness Strategies in the Conversations of the Coursebook “Top Notch 2” Pre-intermediate (the First Edition) Is the result of my own research in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Art at University of Languages and International Studies, VNU Hanoi.I certify that this thesis has not been submitted for any other degree at any other university or institution.
Ha Noi, December, 2013 Author’s signature Vii Thi Thanh Huyén ACKNOWLEGEMENTS I would like to express my thanks to all those who have assisted me in my research work. To my supervisor Dr. Do ThiThanh Ha, I owe a special debt of gratitude for her great encouragement, constructive guidance and precious comment as well as suggestionson my thesis writing. I also wish to acknowledge my deep gratitude to all the teachers of Faculty of Post-graduate Studies, University of Languages and International Studies, VNU for furnishing me with valuable knowledge and experience during the course.
My special thanks also go to my colleagues and friends for their assistance in completing the research. To all the authors of the publications in the list of references, I offer my sincere thanks for the ideas from which I have benefited. My final heart-felt thanks are given to my family members, without whose moral support, unfailing love and encouragement, I could not have got this far. ABSTRACT It is undeniable that English nowadays has become indispensable means of international communication.
However, there are still a large number of Vietnamese EFL learners who have not achieved success in using English in their communication since they may face difficulty understanding the content of conversation or expressing exactly what they mean. One of the significant factors necessary for students to get more successful in English conversations is the awareness of politeness strategieswhich are implicitly introduced in textbooks. The study is conducted using descriptive qualitative research method to find out politeness strategies in the course book “Top Notch 2” (the First Edition). In order to fulfill these aims, the author picked up 150 utterances from the sound bites and the conservation models in the course book to analyze in the light of politeness theory proposed by Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987).
The findings and results of the study show that most of negative and positive politeness strategies are found in the conversations and among them positive politeness strategies 4, 5 and 2, negative politeness strategies 2, 1, and 6 are most frequently used. In addition, the author also would like to offer some useful implications for effective teaching of positive and negative politeness strategies. TABLE OF CONTENTS *Declaration i *Acknowledgements il * Abstract 11 *Table of contents IV *List of abbreviations, tables and figures vil PART A: INTRODUCTION 1 1.Aims of the study 2 3.ObJective of the study 3 4.Scope of the study 3 5.Significance of the study 3 6.Design of the study 4 PART B: DEVELOPMENT 5 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 5 1. An overview of Speech act 6 iv 1.
Politeness and politeness strategies 1. The concept of face 1. Face threatening acts 10 1. Positive politeness and positive politeness strategies 13 1.
Negative politeness and negative politeness strategies 17 1. Summary 24 CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY 25 2. Data-related issues 25 2. Data types to be collected 26 2.
Procedure of data collection 26 2. Summary 27 CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 28 3. The use of positive and negative politenessstrategies in the 28 conversations of “Top Notch 2”(the first edition) 3. Positive politeness strategies in the conversations of the course 29 book “Top Notch 2”(the first edition) 3.
Negative politeness strategies in the conversations of the course 38 book “Top Notch 2”(the first edition) 3. Implications for teaching politeness strategies in thecourse book “Top 43 Notch 2” (the first edition) 3. Implication for teaching politeness strategies 43 3. Supplementary exercises and activities for teaching politeness 44 strategies in the course book “Top Notch 2” (the first edition) 3.
Summary 49 PART C: CONCLUSION 50 1. Limitations of the study 51 4. Suggestions for further study 52 REFERENCES I APPENDIX IV vi List of Abbreviations, Tables and Figures List of abbreviations EFL English as a foreign language ESL English as a second language S) The speaker H The hearer/ Addressee FTA Face threatening act N.P Positive Politeness Page For example List of tables Table 1: The proportion of positive and negative politeness strategies Table 2: The proportion of positive politeness strategies Table 3: The proportion of negative politeness strategies List of figures Figure 1: Circumstances determining choice of strategy vii PART A: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale Language, generally speaking, is created as a necessary demand of human life with the crucial aim of communication.
Since different people from different cultural and social backgrounds may have different ways to exchange information and express their attitudes and opinions, the question of how to successfully communicate in certain contexts, especially in cross-cultural communication has attracted great attention from linguists and has been widely discussed so far. It is commonly believed that understanding social conventions and paying attention to such concepts as politeness and face will definitely allow us to have better comprehension of a variety of speaking ways by people from different cultures, thus helping eliminate ethnic stereotypes and misunderstandings. As claimed by Celce-Murcia and Olshtain (2000), “when learning a second language, one needs to acquire the new culture politeness framework, which is very different from that of one’s own culture”. Obviously, students’ master of the cultural knowledge in general and strategies to choose the language politely in particular is supposed to make a valuable contribution to their ability to well communicate with confidence in any English speaking environment.
With such great importance to language competence and communication skill, politeness strategies are strongly recommended to be included in the course designs for teaching and learning English as a second language in universities and schools. Among popular course books for English learners, Top Notch series (with Summit), as claimed by Pearson Longman, is an award-winning six-level communicative course for adults and young adults. This course book series have also been used and evaluated by a number of ESL institutes and teachers in the world. Eslami, Esmaeli, Ghavaminia, and Rajabi (2010) chosed to evaluate the four mostly instructed courses in Iran English language institutes namelyTop Notch, Interchange, Headway, and On Your Markbased on Mcdounough and Shaw’s (2003) division of course book evaluation into internal and external evaluation.
After a thorough examination, the researchers came to the conclusion that “Top Notch best meets Mcdounough and Shaw’s (2003) evaluation criteria”. According to the result of the study by Alemi and Mesbah (2013), the Top Notch series offered certain benefits to language learners such as “encouraging thestudents to communicate successfully by giving them lots of opportunities for interaction, and demonstrating cultural-based aspects not only through lively and authentic visual images but also without cultural bias” (Alemi&Mesbah, 2013-162).Frommy and my colleagues ’personal experiences as English lecturers who have been making use of these books as text books in the official English teaching program for students at FPT university for nearly four years, we has got deeply interested in their effective communicative approach with the main focus on natural and authentic communication, the promotion of integrated language- skills practice as well as the inclusion of topical themes in interactive conversations. In order to make better and more effective use of this course book series in teaching, the author of the present study has had strong desire for chances of conducting anin-depth study on these books’ communicative approach. All the aforementioned reasons have encouraged the researcher to work on this study with the objectives of gaining insights into the positive and negative politeness strategies in the conversations of the course book “Top Notch 2” by Joan M.
Saslow and Allen Ascher -the third book in the Top Notch and Summit series introduced above. Aims of the study Firstly, the study is aimed to investigate the politeness strategies utilized in the conversations of the course book selected. The second aim the study expected to achieve is to provide teachers with some suggestions for the effective teaching of polite strategies in the book “Top Notch 2” (the first edition). Objectives of the study In order to achieve the aims mentioned above, the objectives are specified as follows: - Identifying and analyzing positive strategies employed in the conversations of “Top Notch 2” (the first edition).
- Identifying and analyzing negative politeness strategies employed in the conversations of “Top Notch 2” (the first edition). - Offering possible implications for teaching positive and negative strategies in an effective and efficient way with specific exercises related to the content of the course book. Scope of the study Politeness strategies which can be presented through verbal and nonverbal behaviors also can be expressed in different ways by different linguists. The research is conducted with no ambition to study politeness strategies with various approaches but it is mainly based on Brown and Levinson’s theoretical framework.
The focus of this study is limited to investigating only the positive and negative politeness strategies in the conversation of “Top Notch 2” (the first condition) without paying much attention to the nonverbal ones. Significance of the study Once having been completed, this study would give decent benefits. With respect to English communication teaching, the study is supposed to serve as noteworthy reference for creating the suitable methods for teaching politeness strategies in the course book “Top Notch 2”.As for English learner of this course book, the research hopefully help not only raise the students’ awareness of the importance of politeness strategies in cross-cultural communication in general but also provide them with specific knowledge of politesse strategies accompanied with their typical words and expressions used in the course book’s conversation as well as related exercises and activities for their learning and practising in particular. Design of the study report Part A: Introduction- presents the rationale, aims, objectives, scope, methods, significance and design of the study.
Part B: Development- consists of three chapters as follows: Chapter 1: Theoretical background- lays the theoretical foundation for the research. Chapter 2: Methodology-details the methods that have been used and the procedures that have been followed by the researcher. Chapter 3: Findings and discussion — reports the study’s finding on which further discussion is offered Part C: Conclusion: ends the study by summarizing its main points as well as finding out the limitation and suggestions for the further studies The following parts are references and appendix. PART B: DEVELOPMENT Chapter 1: Literature Review 1.
Introduction This chapter aims at providing a theoretical background to the research as well as review of previous related studies, which is necessary for and relevant to the analysis and interpretation of data. Communicative competence There have been so far various concepts of communicative competence by language scholars of different fields. According to Hymes (1967), communicative competence includes not only knowledge of the linguistics forms of a language but also its social rules, knowledge of when, how and to whom it is appropriate to use these forms.