“It was not as bad as I thought it would be”: politeness strategies in students' self-reflection journals

The paper is based on an analysis of a self-compiled corpus of 150 self-reflection journals written by students of an EAP course focused on presentation skills. In these journals, students reflect upon and evaluate several talks of various genres they have given throughout the term. They assess the entire process, i.e. preparing for the talks as well as the delivery, paying a special attention to their own emotions (both positive and negative ones). Having to describe their own accomplishments imposes multiple threats to their face – the teacher wants them to succeed and hence they should explain and illustrate how they have improved; however, at the same time, by expressing self-praise, which is often seen as boastfulness, they violate the Modesty Maxim as defined by Leech (1983). Moreover, another threat is caused by the fact they should also describe their weaknesses, not only strengths. To overcome these threats, students employ various positive and negative politeness strategies, such as joking, self-deprecation, hedging or attributing their success to a mere luck. Finally, the author would like to show how her students try to overcome the threat also by attending to the positive face of others, i.e. the teacher and their classmates, perhaps to prove that they themselves cannot claim the full credit for their progress