Politeness strategies in the greetings of Spanish learners in virtual language learning environments

Emilia Alonso-Marks; Mariche Bayonas

doi:10.7557/1.12.2.7045

Authors

Emilia Alonso-Marks Institute for the Empirical Study of Language, Ohio University
Mariche Bayonas University of North Carolina Greensboro

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7557/1.12.2.7045

Keywords:

politeness strategies, greetings, online learning, Spanish learners

Abstract

The present study reveals how 34 Spanish learners from two different cultures and first-language backgrounds follow politeness norms related to greetings in the context of a collaborative cross cultural online learning (CCOL) classroom project. Using WhatsApp, students are instructed to upload a 1-minute introduction video about themselves. Then, after watching their peers’ videos, students are asked to greet and welcome international members to their teams. Data from students’ initial greetings identify a significant difference in terms of number of greetings and the type of semantic formulas used. Results support previous research in identifying a sense of cordiality and warmth within Indian society toward guests that gets replicated in the second language context. Indian students tend toward involvement, whereas the American Students tend to orient towards independence in the involvement/independence dichotomy (Félix-Brasdéfer 2006). Understanding how these politeness norms transfer would be an essential tool in facilitating intercultural exchanges and collaborations as students meet the social, global, and cultural demands of the 21^st century.

References

Alcón-Soler, E. & Martínez-Flor, A. (2008). Investigating Pragmatics in Foreign Language Learning, Teaching and Testing (Eds.), Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781847690869

Appel, C. & Mullen, T. (2000). Pedagogical considerations for Web-based tandem language exchange. Computers and Education 34, pp. 291–308. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0360-1315(99)00051-2

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words? Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.

Baratta, A. (2009). A fine ‘How do you do’: Contextual factors within English greetings. In M. A. Vyas & Y. L. Patel (Eds.), Teaching English as a second language: A new pedagogy for a new century (pp. 162-179). New Delhi, India: PHI Learning.

Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2001). Evaluating the empirical evidence: Grounds for instruction in pragmatics. In K. R. Rose & G. Kasper (Eds.), Pragmatics in language teaching (pp. 13-22). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139524797.005

Baron, Noemi S. (1998). Letters by phone or speech by other means: the linguistics of email. Language and Communication 18, pp. 133–170. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0271-5309(98)00005-6

Baron, Naomi S. (2013) Do mobile technologies reshape speaking, writing, or reading? Mobile Media & Communication 1, pp. 134-140. https://doi.org/10.1177/2050157912459739

Beißwenger, M. & Pappert, S. (2019). How to be polite with emojis: a pragmatic analysis of face work strategies in an online learning environment. EuJAL 7, pp. 225–253. https://doi.org/10.1515/eujal-2019-0003

Bonsignori, V., Bruti, S., & Masi, S. (2011). Formulae across languages: English greetings, leave-takings and good wishes in dubbed Italian. In A. Serban, A. Matamala, & J. M. Lavaur (Eds.), Audiovisual translation in close-up: Practical and theoretical approaches (pp. 23-44). Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang.

Bou-Franch, P. (2011). Openings and closings in Spanish email conversations. Journal of Pragmatics 43, pp. 1772–1785. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.11.002

Cantamutto, L. & Vela Delfa, C. (2019a). Emojis frecuentes en las interacciones por WhatsApp: estudio comparativo entre dos variedades de español (Argentina y España). Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 77, pp. 171-186. https://doi.org/10.5209/CLAC.63282

Cantamutto, L. & Vela Delfa, C. (2019b). Interpretación de emojis en interacciones digitales en español. Lenguas Modernas 54, pp. 29-47.

Cohen, A. (1996). Developing the ability to perform speech acts. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 18, pp. 253-267. https://doi.org/10.1017/S027226310001490X

Crystal, D. (2001). Language and the Internet. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139164771

Culpeper, J. Mackey, A. & Taguchi, N. (2018). Second Language Pragmatics: From Theory to Practice. Oxford/New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315692388

Duranti, A. (1997a). Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511810190

Duranti, A. (1997b). Universal and culture-specific properties of greetings. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 7:1, pp. 63-97. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.1997.7.1.63

Ellis, R. (1994). The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: OUP.

Felecan, D. (2015). Conventional vs unconventional linguistic means of address. (Old and new greetings in Romanian). Diacronia 1, pp. 1-23. https://doi.org/10.17684/i1A4en

Félix-Brasdéfer, C. (2012). Email openings and closings: pragmalinguistic and gender variation in learner-instructor cyber consultations. In E. Alcón-Soler & M.P. Sanfont-Jordà (Eds.), Discourse and Language Learning across L2 Instructional Settings. Utrecht Studies in Language and Communication 24, pp. 223-248. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401208598_012

Ferrer, M.C. & Sánnchez-Lanza, C. (2002). Interacción verbal: Los actos de habla. Rosario (Argentina): Universidad Nacional de Rosario.

Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in public: Microstudies of the public order. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.

Greere, A. (2005). Politeness as communicative strategy: Greetings. Studia Universitatis Babes- Bolyai. Philologia, 50, pp. 11-22.

Haverkate, H. (1994). La cortesía verbal: Estudio pragmalingüístico. Madrid: Gredos.

Imo, W. (2015). Vom ikonischen über einen indexikalischen zu einem symbolischen Ausdruck?Eine konstruktionsgrammatische Analyse des Emoticons :-). In Jörg Bücker, Susanne Günthner & Wolfgang Imo (eds.), Konstruktionsgrammatik V, pp.133–162. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.

Kakiuchi, Y. (2005). Greetings in English: Naturalistic speech versus textbook speech. In Pragmatics in Language Learning, Theory, and Practice. Tokyo: JALT Pragmatics. Pp. 61–85.

Koike, D. & Félix-Brasdefer, C. (2021). The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics: Foundations and Interfaces. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429455643

Li, Li & Yang, Y. (2018). Pragmatic functions of emoji in internet-based communication – a corpus-based study. Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education 3, pp. 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40862-018-0057-z

Lupyan, G. & Dale, R. (2016). Why are there different languages? The role of adaptation in linguistic diversity. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20, pp. 649-660. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.07.005

Maíz-Arévalo, C. (2017). Expressive speech acts in educational e-chats. Soprag 5, pp. 151–178. https://doi.org/10.1515/soprag-2017-0016

Martín Gascueña, R. (2016). La conversación guasap. Pragmática Sociocultural 4, pp. 108-134. https://doi.org/10.1515/soprag-2015-0010

Maynor, N. (1994). The language of electronic mail: written speech? In Little, Greta D., Montgomery, Michael (Eds.), Centennial Usage Studies. Alabama University Press, Tuscaloosa, AL, pp. 48–54. https://doi.org/10.1215/-78-1-48

Michno, J. (2017). Greeting and leave-taking in Texas: Perceptions of politeness norms by Mexican-Americans across sociolinguistic divides. Spanish in Context, 14, pp. 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.14.1.01mic

Ngaleka, A. & Uys, W. (2013). m-Learning with WhatsApp: A conversation analysis. In E. Ivala (Ed.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on E-Learning, pp. 282–291, Cape Town, ACPI.

O’Dowd, R. (2018). From telecollaboration to virtual exchange: state-of-the-art and the role of UNICollaboration in moving forward. Journal of Virtual Exchange 1, pp. 1-23. https://doi.org/10.14705/rpnet.2018.jve.1

Pérez Sabater, C. (2015). Discovering language variation in WhatsApp text interactions. ONOMÁZEIN 31, pp. 113-126. https://doi.org/10.7764/onomazein.31.8

Pérez Sabater, C. (2019). Emoticons in relational writing practices on WhatsApp: Some reflections on gender. In P. Bou-Franch & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), Analyzing Digital Discourse: New Insights and Future Directions (chapter 7). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92663-6_6

Pinto, D. (2008). Passing greetings and interactional style: A cross-cultural study of American English and Peninsular English. Multilingua 27, pp. 371-388. https://doi.org/10.1515/MULTI.2008.017

Sacks, H. (1975). Everyone has to lie. In B. Blount & M. Sanches (Eds.), Sociocultural dimensions of language use (pp. 57-80). New York, NY: Academic Press.

Schegloff, E. A. & Sacks, H. (1973). Opening up Closings. Semiotica 8, pp. 69-99. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.1973.8.4.289

Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139173438

Searle, J. & Vanderveken, D. (1985). Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3167-X_5

Shively, R. 2021. Assessing L2 pragmatic competence. In César Félix-Brasdefer & Rachel Shively (Eds.), New Directions in Second Language Pragmatics (pp. 131-141). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110721775-010

Shleykina, G. (2016). The speech act of greeting performed by Russian EFL learners. Oklahoma State University. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.

Shleykina, G. (2019). The interlanguage pragmatics of greetings. Beyond Words 7, pp. 43-60. https://doi.org/10.33508/bw.v7i1.1848

Simpson, J.A., Gangestad, S.W. & Biek, M. (1993). Personality and Nonverbal Social Behavior: An Ethological Perspective of Relationship Initiation. Journal of Experimental Psychology 29:5, pp. 434-461. https://doi.org/10.1006/jesp.1993.1020

Sun, D. (2014). From communicative competence to interactional competence: A new outlook to the teaching of spoken English. Journal of Language Teaching and Research 5, pp. 1062-1071. https://doi.org/10.4304/jltr.5.5.1062-1070

Taguchi, N. (2017). Interlanguage pragmatics. In A. Barron, P. Grundy, & G. Yueguo (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics, (pp. 153-167), Oxford/New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315668925-14

Taguchi, N. (2019). Second language acquisition and pragmatics: An overview. In N. Taguchi (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pragmatics (pp. 1-15). Oxford/New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351164085-1

van Compernolle, R. A., & Williams, L. (2012). Reconceptualizing sociolinguistic competence as mediated action: Identity, meaning-making, agency. The Modern Language Journal 96, pp. 234-250. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2012.01334.x

Waring, H. Z. (2012). ‘How was your weekend?’: Developing the interactional competence in managing routine inquiries. Language Awareness 21, pp. 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658416.2011.644797

Yus, F. (2001). Ciberpragmática. Ariel, Barcelona.

Zieliński, A. (2018). Las fórmulas de saludo en polaco y en español. Romanica Cracoviensia 2, pp.105-114. https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.18.012.9584