Regulative Discourse for Pre-Schoolers: Should English Language Teachers Be Polite?

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

1 Department of Pedagogy, Didactics of Social Sciences, Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Universitat Jaume I, Castelló, Spain

2 Department of English Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Universitat Jaume I, Castelló, Spain

10.22055/rals.2022.17799

Abstract

This study aims to contribute to the research literature on politeness in language teachers’ requestive behaviour. More specifically, it adopts a multilingual approach to explore teachers’ politeness strategies in the English for Young Learners (EYL) classroom, an underresearched instructional setting where regulative discourse tends to predominate. Participants are two pre-school teachers and two intact groups of 4/5-year-old children. 1,942 procedural and disciplinary directives in six video-recorded lessons are processed from a discourse-pragmatic perspective centred on directness, modifiers, and person deixis. The emerging syntactic and sequential design of regulative discourse seems to respond to factors like activity type and differing understandings of classroom power relations or deontic stances (Stevanovic, 2011). Results can serve as an awareness-raising exercise useful to draw attention to the need of strengthening practitioners’ pragmatic sensitivity in teacher training.

Keywords

Journal of Research in Applied Linguistics
Volume 13, Issue 2
Special Edition: Politeness and Impoliteness Research
September 2022
Pages 6-21

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