Politeness in an academic contextOmani and American requests and apologies

Resumen

This study compares requests and apologies produced by an Omani and an American group of students. The pragmatic skills required to create appropriate speech acts of this kind have been given little attention and have also been rarely taught explicitly, in contrast to the attention given to the four traditional skills (Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing) in the EFL/ESL settings. The lack of knowledge and use of these skills would have a serious impact on the flow of communication and can lead to misunderstandings between interlocutors, especially if there is a difference in culture and background knowledge of the others culture. This dissertation examines the differences and similarities found in the types of requests and apologies produced in a Discourse Completion Test by students from the two groups with respect to types and frequency of strategies employed for each speech act. Moreover, the use of request and apology strategies is studied with respect to such variables as rating of imposition, power and distance between interlocutors. These variables are often relative to the cultural context, and this dissertation tries to isolate sociopragmatic factors and proficiency factors as possible explanations for observed differences. The results show that Omani students use fewer indirect request strategies than the American counterparts. This was shown directly by examining the range of strategies and modifiers used, and, more indirectly, by examining the utterance length, strategy combinations, and relative use proportions across situations. On the other hand, it is shown that apology strategies, although sometimes distributed differently across situations often on the basis of sociopragmatic factors, are employed in similar ways by the two groups. The study recommends that three important factors needed to be considered when we deal with teaching and learning of pragmatics in the Omani context due to the clear weakness in knowledge and comprehension by Omani students. Instructors need to be aware of the inclusion of pragmatic teaching in the curricula. Instructors need to receive training during course of study for their teaching degrees and the final recommendation is to include pragmatic and cultural aspects of language in the national Foundation Program Structure (FPS).