A study on the acquisition of linguistic politeness in English by Indonesian Elementary School students

English is an important international language which is used in various kinds of fields by many countries. Therefore, in Indonesia nowadays teaching English to young learners has been realized as a need. One indicator that teaching ESL is successful is that the learners have communicative competence. Communicative competence includes both linguistic and pragmatic knowledge. Politeness is the part of pragmatic knowledge. It should be operated in the same level with the other pragmatic principles. The writer in this study wants to know how elementary school students acquire linguistic politeness in English. ESL learners especially those who are still in the elementary school often have difficulty when facing with the culture of the target language. They do not know what is considered polite and what is not. Moreover, their linguistic acquisition is still in development. In order to know how elementary students acquire linguistic politeness, the writer holds an observation in Intan Permata Hati Christian Elementary School. The writer only observes the fourth-grade students of Intan Permata Hati Christian Elementary School. She notes down some conversations which contain requests and analyzes them. This study reveals that: 1) Most of the subjects tend to use baldly on-record FTA (Face Threatening Act) in making requests. 2) The off-record FTA is used many times by the subjects besides the negative politeness. 3) The negative politeness is used only when the subjects speak to the teachers. 4) The politeness marker that is often used by the subjects is "may". 5) Teachers in this study hold a a crucial role in the politeness acquisition of the students besides other media such as television, computer, and books. After doing her study, the writer proposes some suggestions: l) In the later developmental stage, students should be introduced to the culture in which the target language is used. 2) Considering that linguistic politeness is one of the important issues in linguistic area, it is a good idea if the library of Widya Mandala University adds books on this topic