Being polite : An experimental study of request strategies in Swedish EFL classes

In a world which continuously becomes more globalised, the need to adapt one's language depending on context becomes increasingly important. This is acknowledged in the Swedish syllabus for the upper-secondary school, which emphasises communicative competence and the need to adapt to situation and hearer. This study uses a foundation based on politeness theory, where the act of requesting is considered a threat to the notion of face. The concept of face that is being used is based on the work of Brown and Levinson (1987) and the idea is that everyone has a positive- and negative face where the former is the need for one’s self-image to be respected and the latter is the freedom to act without imposition from others. By role-playing different scenarios, the participants of the study, all students of the English 7 course, were asked to perform requests which varied in imposition and which targeted hearers of different statuses. The results were analysed using a qualitative approach, which leads to the conclusion that half of the six participants adapted their language appropriately to the communicative situation. Those three had managed to show an increase in face-saving acts where the imposition was greater, or the hearer was of a higher status. That only half of the participants managed to do this shows a lack of success in teaching the students the necessary pragmatic skills encoded in the syllabus and more focused studies in this area are recommended to address this issue. Due to the small number of participants, further studies are needed to fully confirm the results presented in this study