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ORIGINAL PAPER
Emotional and Educational Consequences of (Im)politeness in Teacher–Student Interaction at HigherEducation
Carmen Santamaría-García1
Received: 8 December 2016 / Accepted: 27 March 2017 / Published online: 3 April 2017
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
Abstract In this article, I will explore some of the emotional and educational
consequences of (im)politeness in teacher–student interaction (T–S interaction,
henceforth) at higher education, with reference to their influence in motivation and
learning. Politeness theory (Brown and Levinson in Questions and politeness:
strategies in social interaction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1978,
Politeness: some universals in language usage, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1987) will be extended to include a discursive approach to the
management of interpersonal relations (Spencer-Oatey in Culturally speaking:
managing rapport through talk across cultures, Continuum, London, 2008), and
further developments towards the expression of impoliteness. (Im)politeness and
rapport management will be analysed in combination with self-determination
(Deci and Ryan in J Res Personal 19:109–134, 1985) and appraisal theories
(Martin in Evaluation in text: authorial stance and the construction of discourse,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000; Martin and White in The language of
evaluation. Appraisal in English, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2005; Hunston
and Thompson in Evaluation in text. Authorial stance and the construction of
discourse, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000; Thompson and Alba-Juez in
Evaluation in context, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2014) in order to examine the
role of motivation and negative evaluative meanings in the construction of
impoliteness in interaction. Data have been extracted from a corpus that is being
compiled by the author. It contains classroom interaction, email exchanges and
higher education students’ reports on their perception of (im)politeness and rap-
port in their academic lives. The data have been processed and analysed
combining corpus linguistics, conversation analysis and systemic functional dis-
course analysis. Results show that the discourse of teaching typically contains
& Carmen Santamarıa-Garcıa
1 University of Alcala, C/Trinidad, 1, 28801 Madrid, Spain
123
Corpus Pragmatics (2017) 1:233–255
DOI 10.1007/s41701-017-0010-2
many rapport sensitive discourse acts and that their face-aggravating potential
increases when conveying negative evaluative language and when students present
a challenging orientation to rapport due to different reasons, being lack of intrinsic
motivation an important one. Other aspects which can result in face aggravation
such as different expectations regarding sociality rights and obligations will be
discussed. As T–S interaction has effects not only on the relations reated among
teachers and students but also on the teaching–learning process, it seems essential
that the involved parties become aware of the impact of rapport management and
of the fact that learning is facilitated by good interpersonal rapport but can be
seriously undermined by its absence.
Keywords Pragmatics · (Im)politeness theory · Appraisal theory · Evaluative
language · Rapport management · Classroom management · Motivation
Introduction and Aims of the Study
The language used for teaching and for T–S interaction will influence interpersonal
rapport both in the classroom and virtual learning environments. Interpersonal
rapport will, in return, influence students’ attitudes and learning processes. Students’
perception of their teachers along a continuum from “ruthless victimizers” on one
end to “kind-hearted” on the other, will largely depend on teachers’ conversational
styles, which will be related not only to their methodological choices but also to face
concerns and interpersonal rapport management, which will be discussed in the
following section.
As teachers, we may have experienced a wide variety of different feelings when
interacting with our students, ranging from enthusiastic excitement to depressing
gloom. If it is incredibly rewarding to witness students’ excitement during their
process of learning and their satisfaction with the acquisition of new concepts and
skills, it is much more less appealing to feel their apathy or contempt, sometimes
unsuccessfully hidden but often ostensively shared. As attendance for continuous
assessment has become compulsory in higher education, we are experiencing an
increase in students’ resistance and disruptive behaviour. While optional attendance
often resulted in the absenteeism of those students with low motivational levels and
therefore, in lack of conflict in the classroom, compulsory attendance is giving them
extrinsic motivation to attend. The problem is that this extrinsic motivation means
control, which goes against students’ need of freedom from imposition and can,
hence, be highly costly for them. As illustrated in this article, it seems to result
costly for other participants involved in the process too. When there is no balance
between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, mainly due to the lack of the first one,
students seem not to accept the formative value or utility of attendance and chances
are high that such attendance is combined with resentment, resistance, and
disinterest, feelings which should be better kept far away from a healthy learning
environment.
The aim of the present paper is to explore some of the reasons why teachers’
discourse in T–S interaction can be perceived as threatening or impolite by students
234 C. Santamarıa-Garcıa
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and may consequently lead to their challenging attitudes of resistance, which may,
in turn, be interpreted as threatening or impolite by teachers. I will also consider
students’ perceptions of (im)politeness and rapport management included in a
collection of 100 students’ reports on T–S interaction in their academic lives. The
theories of (im)politeness, self determination and appraisal will be combined for the
description of positive and negative evaluative language in T–S interaction and their
possible effects in teacher–student rapport management and learning processes.
Although research has been carried out in the context of higher education, many of
the findings may apply to different educational levels.
My hypothesis, based on a teaching experience of 23 years and the participant
observation of discourse in teaching–learning situations at different levels, is that
many of the discourse acts typically included in teachers’ discourse are potentially
threatening for students’ faces and can be interpreted by students as teachers’
exercise of control and negative evaluation, at least when discourse acts are taken to
be intended against students´ benefit and interest, which will be explored under the
concept of sociality rights.
Theoretical Framework
The following sections present the theoretical framework on (im)politeness, self-
determination and appraisal theories, which have been employed in the description
and analysis of the data. Different concepts have been borrowed from these theories
in order to describe and analyse positive and negative evaluative language in T–S
interaction and their possible effect in the interpretation of (im)politeness and
learning.
(Im)politeness and Rapport Management
The concept of face is central for an understanding of the processes involved in
relational work. Defined by Goffman (1967: 5) as “the positive social value a person
claims for himself [sic]” in terms of “approved social attributes”, was redefined by
Brown and Levinson (1987: 61) as “the public self-image that every member wants
to claim for himself [sic]”, which includes negative face, “the basic claim to
territories, personal preserves, rights to non-distraction—that is, to freedom of
action and freedom from imposition”, and positive face, “the desire that this self-
image be appreciated and approved of” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 61). The
original sense of face as both the result of speakers’ presentation and its construction
by others was, hence, lost but has been recovered in later revisions. For instance,
Riley (2006: 298) sees face as “both constructed and projected by speakers and
attributed to them”. Matsumoto (1988) has also challenged Brown and Levinson’s
conceptualization of face because they have “ignored the interpersonal or social
perspective on face, and (…) overemphasized the notion of individual freedom and
autonomy”, as observed by Spencer-Oatey (2008: 13). Taking these arguments into
consideration and adopting a social psychological approach, Spencer-Oatey (2008:
14–15) proposes a wider concept of face, which is made up of three aspects:
Emotional and Educational Consequences of (Im)politeness… 235
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individual identity, group or collective identity and relational (in relationship with
others). “People have a fundamental desire for others to evaluate them positively”
(Spencer-Oatey 2008: 14), regarding their attributes concerning the three aspects.
However, what counts as positive evaluation is not defined and consideration of
appraisal theory in this study will contribute to its definition.
Face sensitivities can be damaged by those acts that are a potential threat for
speakers’ “sense of worth, dignity and identity (…) associated with issues such as
respect, honour, status, reputation and competence” (Spencer-Oatey 2008: 13).
Rapport management, that is, the management of harmony–disharmony among
people entails the three components of (1) face sensitivities, (2) sociality rights and
obligations and (3) interactional goals. Sociality rights and obligations can be based
on legal requirements or, more commonly, on normative behaviours. People
develop expectations regarding what is appropriate behavior, rights and obligations
in different circumstances, and such expectations can be manifestations of values, as
Spencer Oatey (2008: 16) observes. She suggests two main values, equity and
association as sociopragmatic interactional principles. Building on her definition, I
will posit that, in the particular context of T–S interaction, teachers and students
develop expectations regarding what is appropriate, according to their beliefs on
equity and association:
Equity: Teachers and students are entitled to personal consideration from each
other, so that they are treated fairly, not unduly imposed upon, not unfairly
ordered about and not taken advantage or exploited. Costs and benefits should
be kept in balance through the principle of reciprocity and so should the
related values for autonomy-imposition.
Association: Teachers and students are entitled to social involvement with
each other, choosing the degree of interactional involvement-detachment (the
extent to which they associate or dissociate, for example, entitled to what they
consider an appropriate amount of conversational interaction, i.e., not ignored
but not overwhelmed). Association also relates to affective involvement-
detachment, the extent to which we share concerns, feelings or interests.
When considering costs-benefits, I would like to remark an important distinctive
feature of T–S interaction, which is that, the cost to students, in terms of time
investment and personal involvement, is not in the teacher’s benefit but in their own.
Therefore, the cost-benefit balance does not only have to be compensated by
reciprocity between teachers and students in order to achieve good rapport, but also
be considered fair by students for their own benefit, i.e. for their formative value.
Lack of motivation may account for an “unfair” judgement of unfairness by some
students, as will be discussed in the following section.
The third factor that can influence interpersonal rapport is interactional goals, that
is, the relational or transactional needs people may want to achieve. “These ´wants´
can significantly affect their perceptions of rapport because any failure to achieve
them can cause frustration and annoyance” (Spencer Oatey 2008: 17).
There are many situations involved in teaching that can be perceived as “rapport-
threatening behavior” in the three main ways that Spencer Oatey (2008: 17)
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suggests: face-threatening behavior, rights-threatening/obligation-omission beha-
viour and goal threatening behavior. Face sensitivity can vary “from person to
person and from context to context” (Spencer Oatey 2008: 14–15) and speakers can
hold different types of rapport orientation: Rapport enhancement orientation,
rapport maintenance orientation, rapport neglect orientation and rapport challenge
orientation (Spencer Oatey 2008: 32 for more details).
Perception of threat and impoliteness will depend on addressees’ judgement, as
several authors have argued (Eelen 2001; Locher and Watts 2008; Haugh 2010a; or
Culpeper 2010 among others). Eelen (2001: 120) observes the central importance of
considering the evaluation of the addressee in the interpretation of politeness in
what he calls “an evaluation-centred model” putting politeness and impoliteness “on
a par”. Another important move in research has been the shift “from an almost
exclusive focus on politeness to a deeper consideration of how impoliteness and
offence arise through interaction” (Haugh 2010a: 7). (Im)politeness has been
increasingly attracting the interest of several authors, (Kaul de Marlangeon
1995, 2008; Culpeper 1996, 2009, 2010, 2011; Bousfield 2008; Locher and
Bousfield 2008; Kaul de Marlangeon and Alba-Juez 2012). Locher and Bousfield
(2008: 3) define impoliteness as: “(…) behaviour that is face-aggravating in a
particular context”. This definition suggests that impoliteness results from the
perception of face-aggravation and is context-dependant, in line with Eelen’s
evaluation-centred model. Culpeper (2010) notes that impoliteness is not necessarily
intentional but can be accidental, although in his earlier definitions of impoliteness,
Culpeper (1996) had claimed that impoliteness has to be perceived as intentional.
The typology of impoliteness by Kaul de Marlangeon (2008), further illustrated
in Kaul de Marlangeon and Alba-Juez (2012), considers the intensity of the
impoliteness force transmitted by the acts in question on a scale (Table 1). The
higher the number, the higher the degree of impoliteness.
Perception on the degree of impoliteness is illustrated by the authors with a
corpus of examples from movies and TV series but not empirically tested. When
trying to use these categories for the analysis of real data, it seems difficult to
distinguish between voluntary and involuntary impolite acts. I do not think it is
possible to be certain of speakers’ purpose either but what is possible is to observe
the effect produced in the addressees’ reactions. For these reasons, I have omitted
Table 1 Politeness–
impoliteness continuum from
Kaul de Marlangeon and Alba-
Juez (2012: 74)
1. Formally impolite acts with a polite purpose
2. Involuntary impolite acts
2.1. Gaffes
2.2. S’s involuntary stint on the politeness expected by H
2.3. Involuntary omission of politeness
3. Self-impoliteness acts
4. Formally polite acts with an impolite purpose
5. S’s voluntary stint on the politeness expected by H
6. Overwhelming silence acts
7. Fustigation impoliteness acts
Emotional and Educational Consequences of (Im)politeness… 237
123
the distinction between voluntary and involuntary impolite acts and mention to
purposes. I have coded (im)politeness in my data under the following categories: (1)
Polite, (2) Formally polite with impolite effect and (3) “S’s stint on the politeness
expected by H”.
In order to explore rapport management in T–S interaction and (im)politeness, I
will focus on the illocutionary domain, inquiring about the speech acts which are
more pervasive in this genre. As stated in the hypothesis for this study, it seems that
many interactional goals in T–S interaction make use of discourse acts which are
potentially “face threatening acts” (FTA in Brown and Levinson 1987), namely,
directives, requests, suggestions, advice, remindings and warnings, which were
characterized by these authors as acts that may threaten the addressees’ need for
negative face, indicating that the speaker “does not intend to avoid impeding H’s
freedom of action” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 65). These acts may also run against
the equity principle outlined above. Another typical activity in teachers’ discourse is
giving feedback. When feedback is negative, it will typically include expressions of
disapproval, complaints, reprimands, contradictions, disagreements, and challenges,
acts which may threaten the addressee’s positive face want, according to the
classification in Brown and Levinson (1987: 68). All these potential FTAs may go
against face sensitivities and sociality rights and obligations, although different
factors will intervene in their interpretation as FTAs or as discourse acts resulting in
no harm.
The analyst’s definition of discourse acts will be essential prior to consideration
of the potential damage for the faces at stake. Tsui (1994) is an essential guide for
such purpose, as she gives detailed accounts of the conditions for a discourse act to
be correctly classified as a realisation of a particular type of discourse act. For
instance, orders resulting in a benefit for the addressee (“Take a biscuit”), would be
interpreted as invitations and no threat would be perceived, unless the context
makes the interpretation of a threat plausible, for instance, if the addressee is on a
diet, the speaker knows and neglects the addressee’s need and desire not to be
tempted.
Self-Determination Theory
Self determination theory was presented by Deci and Ryan (1985) in an attempt to
specify the factors in social contexts that can produce variability in intrinsic
motivation. It focuses primarily on three main psychological needs, “namely, the
innate needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness” (Ryan and Deci 2000: 57).
They are essential for the enhancement of intrinsic motivation. These authors
further specify that feelings of competence will not enhance intrinsic motivation
unless they are accompanied by a sense of autonomy. Autonomy and relatedness
seem to correspond to some extent with Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) two
basic needs for negative and positive face, respectively, that is, autonomy with
negative face as the basic need for freedom of action and freedom from imposition
and relatedness with positive face as the desire that the self-image be appreciated
and approved of. When both basic human needs are combined with a feeling of
competence as self-efficacy, which can be derived from appreciation and positive
238 C. Santamarıa-Garcıa
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feedback for actions, intrinsic motivation will be enhanced. If we consider a wider
concept of face, as formulated by Spencer-Oatey (2008: 13) and described in the
previous section of this article, including people’s individual sense of worth and
competence together with their group and relational faces and needs for equity and
association we seem to arrive at the same point concerning basic human needs from
both politeness and self-determination theories.
Extrinsic motivated actions can be performed, as Ryan and Deci (2000: 55)
explain: “with an attitude of willingness that reflects an inner acceptance of the
value or utility of a task” but also “with resentment, resistance, and disinterest”.
Potentially conflictive situations may arise when students perform extrinsic
motivated actions with the latter. When students lack intrinsic motivation, identified
as “a natural wellspring of learning and achievement” which “results in high-quality
learning and creativity” (Ryan and Deci 2000: 55), and only have extrinsic
motivation, typically characterized in the classic literature, as “a pale and
impoverished (even if powerful) form of motivation that contrasts with intrinsic
motivation” (Ryan and Deci 2000: 55), chances are that they offer resistance to
attendance and to teachers’ plans. Joining in groups against the teacher will help
strengthen the three aspects of face observed by Spencer Oatey (2008: 14), i.e. their
individual face and self-esteem, together with their group and relational identities.
This observation finds support in Edwards’ (2009: 27) claim that “us and them
boundaries (…) can heighten feelings of individual worth. A corollary is that in-
group solidarity should be expected to strengthen at times when one’s sense of
worth is threatened or tenuous”. It is no wonder, then, that resistant students show a
tendency to join in groups in an attempt to find solidarity and strength to put up with
classroom tasks and daily routines.
Studies on motivation in the college classroom (such as Pintrich 1994)
distinguish different variables for academic achievement such as students’
motivational beliefs, classroom context, and students’ behaviors. It seems clear
from research that intrinsic motivation, a psychological construct accounting for
voluntary behaviours (Weiner 1986, 1992) and defined by Ryan and Deci (2000: 56)
as “the doing of an activity for its inherent satisfactions rather than for some
separable consequence” is an essential condition for learning (Willis 1996;
Zimmerman and Schunk 2015). The problem is that this valuable intrinsic
motivation may be either engendered or undermined by educational factors. Deci
and Ryan (1985) presented Cognitive Evaluation Theory (CET) a subtheory of self-
determination theory in an attempt to specify the factors in social contexts that
produce variability in intrinsic motivation. “CET argues that interpersonal events
and structures (e.g., rewards, communications, feedback) that conduce toward
feelings of competence during action can enhance intrinsic motivation for that
action because they allow satisfaction of the basic psychological need for
competence” (Ryan and Deci 2000: 58). What is also very relevant for the present
research is their finding that this intrinsic motivation needs “a sense of autonomy”.
This means that controlling, extrinsic motivation can undermine intrinsic motiva-
tion. This finding lies at the base of studies in different disciplines which plead
against compulsory attendance policies in university (Hyde and Flournoy 1986; St.
Clair 1999).
Emotional and Educational Consequences of (Im)politeness… 239
123
Students’ negative attitudes of resistance performed in T–S interaction usually
result in decreasing motivation levels and learning limitations. There is an extensive
literature on the relationship between teachers and learners interaction and L2
learning (Boulima 1999; Chaudron 1988; Gass and Varonis 1991; Hatch 1978; Tsui
1995). Worth mentioning also, research on “proficiency face” and the limitations
imposed by a vulnerable positive face on learning a foreign language or using a
lingua franca (Ahvenainen 2013). These authors stress the importance of negotiated
interaction in learners’ formulation of hypotheses about the target language, which
is considered an essential step for its acquisition. Unfortunately, when students
bring challenging attitudes of resistance to the classroom, they limit interaction and
learning opportunities at the same time. Such resistance may even be brought to a
first class session or emailed before meeting the teacher because it may have
nothing to do with a particular teacher’s behavior or personality but be related to
students’ lack of intrinsic motivation, as explained above, which translates into an
increased perception of weight for students’ costs and a challenging attitude towards
the teacher’s role and identity. To make things worse, some of the typical discourse
acts expected to be performed in teachers’ roles have a high potential to be “face
threatening” to students, as data analysis shows and will be further discussed.
Appraisal Theory
The need to connect evaluation and politeness finds support in Channell (2000: 55):
“The whole area of evaluative language seems to require tying up with the notion of
‘facework’ employed by Brown and Levinson (1987) in their explanation of
politeness”, as previously discussed (Santamarıa-Garcıa 2013, 2014a). Description
of the evaluative language in T–S interaction has been approached through the
system of appraisal, as developed for the study of evaluative language within the
framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (Hunston and Thompson
2000; Martin 2000; Martin and White 2005) with further elaborations by Bednarek
(2008) and Thompson and Alba-Juez (2014). I will focus on attitude, the resource
for the expression of appraisal, including meanings of affect, judgement and
appreciation (Martin and White 2005: 38). Table 2 presents an overview of
resources for the expression of attitude, which have been used for tagging the
expression of attitudes by teachers and students in the corpus data.
Table 2 Overview of appraisal resources based on Martin and White (2005: 38) and Bednarek (2008:
161)
Appraisal system
Attitude Affect Un/happiness, in/security, dis/satisfaction, dis/inclination, surprise
Judgement Social esteem (normality, capacity, tenacity)
Social sanction (veracity, propriety)
Appreciation Reaction, composition, valuation
240 C. Santamarıa-Garcıa
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For the purpose of description and analysis of the data, the categories of positive
and negative evaluative language in T–S interaction are defined here, elaborating on
a previous definition in Santamarıa-Garcıa (2016: 28). Positive evaluative languagerefers to the expression of attitude of positive polarity in the different categories of
affect, judgement and appreciation while negative evaluative language will be
defined as the expression of attitude of negative polarity in the same categories.
Therefore, instances of happiness, security, satisfaction (positive polarity) will be
considered as realisations of positive evaluative language, while instances of
unhappiness, insecurity, dissatisfaction (negative polarity) will be considered as
realisations of negative evaluative language. These meanings can be expressed but
also, and most relevantly for this study, can be conveyed or invoked. Invokedmeanings are indirect realisations of meanings, as described by Martin and White
(2005: 61–68). Invoked negative meanings might be responsible for the interpre-
tation of some acts, apparently non offensive or even polite, as face threatening.
Analysis of the data, will examine the relationship between invoked attitudinal
meanings and impoliteness, which will hopefully contribute to a better understand-
ing of lack of rapport in T–S interaction.
Data and Method
Data have been extracted from a corpus that is being compiled by the author in the
context of English Language Teaching (ELT) in Teacher Education, due to the lack
of available data of T–S interaction and to the need of specific data for the purposes
of my research on (im)politeness in T–S interaction. The corpus under compilation
contains three different corpora:
(1) 25,000 words from classroom interaction (henceforth CI) in ELT using Task
Based Learning (TBL). Words from teaching materials are excluded, as only
interaction has been examined.
(2) 25,000 words from email and virtual educational platform exchanges
(henceforth E/V). Words from teaching materials are excluded, as above.
(3) 80,000 words from 100 students’ written recollections on their perception of
(im)politeness and rapport in classroom interaction. They were asked to write
about those teachers who had achieved the most and the least positive rapport
in their academic lives. They also had to include comments on the typical
expressions their teachers used to make directives or requestives and give
feedback. This methodology involves retrospection and introspection, as
observed by Culpeper et al. (2010).
Participants in the corpus have been taking courses at degree and master levels in
Teacher Education at University of Alcala. Their ages range from their early
twenties to their early thirties. They come from the following countries: 45% Spain,
45% United States, 10% from other countries (mainly European). Compilation of
the sample started in 2012 and is an ongoing project. The languages are English and
Spanish, sometimes used as native languages and sometimes as language of
Emotional and Educational Consequences of (Im)politeness… 241
123
instruction. This information, together with other contextual details, are included in
tags, following version P5, the latest version of Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines(TEI). TEI has been used for corpus mark-up since its first appearance in 1990 and
the author is familiar with it since then, when she participated in the design of the
coding schema for the CORLEC, as described in Ballester et al. (1993). The TEI
guidelines contain “key recommendations about suitable ways of representing those
features of textual resources which need to be identified explicitly in order to
facilitate processing by computer programs. In particular, they specify a set of
markers (or tags) which may be inserted in the electronic representation of the text,
in order to mark the text structure and other features of interest”.
Several authors have discussed the advantages of small specialised corpora (cf.
Koester 2010; Flowerdew 2002, 2004, O’Keeffe 2007 or Tribble 2002) and of
“tailor-made corpus”, as expressed by Romero-Trillo (2014: 2), when authors need
to illustrate some very specific features of communication, as is the case here with
(im)politeness in T–S interaction and students’ perception of politeness. Koester
(2010: 67) notes several of the advantages of small specialized corpora:
Where very large corpora, through their de-contextualisation, give insights
into lexico-grammatical patterns in the language as a whole, smaller
specialized corpora give insights into patterns of language use in particular
settings. With a small corpus, the corpus compiler is often also the analyst, and
therefore usually has a high degree of familiarity with the context. This means
that the quantitative findings revealed by corpus analysis can be balanced and
complemented with qualitative findings (Flowerdew 2004; O’Keeffe 2007).
Regarding size, it is difficult to say how small and how specialized a corpus can be
to yield powerful results. According to Koester (2010: 67) “a relatively modest
corpus may still yield robust and powerful findings” and he gives as examples the
52,000 POTTI Corpus of post-observation teacher trainee interaction (Farr and
O’Keeffe 2002), Koester’s (2006) 34,000-word Corpus of American and British
Office Talk (ABOT) and Cutting (1999, 2000) corpus of only 25,000 words of
conversation between students to investigate grammatical items contributing to in-
group identity. What is more important in these cases than the size is that the corpus
can reveal insights into patterns that “can be linked to pragmatically specialised uses
within that particular context of situation” (Koester 2010: 74).
Due to the fact that recording and transcribing conversation is very time
consuming, sizes of spoken corpora are much smaller than their written
counterparts. Reppen (2010: 34) suggests this estimate of time needed to transcribe
an hour of conversation: “Depending on the quality of the recording and the level of
detail included in the transcription (marking prosody, marking intonation, timing
pauses, etc.), it can take ten to fifteen hours to transcribe an hour of spoken
language”. From my own experience in recording and transcribing conversations for
Corpus Oral de Referencia de la Lengua Española Contemporánea (CORLEC),
even 20 h may be needed for orthographic transcription of an hour of speech if there
are several simultaneous conversations in overlap, which is not rare in conversation.
It is important to note, though, that no claims are being made about the
representativeness of the corpus described here for ELT interaction in general. In
242 C. Santamarıa-Garcıa
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order to build a representative corpus of the genre, care should be taken to follow
O’Keeffe et al. (2007: 1) advice:
For example, if we decided to build a corpus representing classroom discourse
in the context of English Language Teaching (ELT), how do we design it so as
to best represent this? Would four hours of recordings from an intermediate
level class in a London language school suffice? Great care is usually taken at
the design stage of a corpus so as to ensure that it is representative. If we
wished to build a corpus to represent classroom discourse in ELT, we would
have to create a design matrix that would ideally capture all the essential
variables of age, gender, location, type of school (e.g. state or private sector),
level, teacher (e.g. gender, qualifications, years of experience, whether native
or non-native speaker), class size (large groups, small groups or one-to-one),
location, nationalities and so on. (O’Keeffe et al. 2007: 1).
The methodology followed in this study has combined corpus linguistics (CL)
techniques within the frameworks of Conversation Analysis (CA) and structural–
functional Discourse Analysis (DA), as done in previous work (Santamarıa-Garcıa
2011, 2013, 2014a, b). An ethnographic approach to life stories has been added
(Plummer 2001; Jones 2005; Norton 2017) in order to explore students’
recollections of their perception of (im)politeness in T–S interaction along their
academic lives. Therefore, this study employs a mixed-method approach, combining
quantitative and qualitative data in a single study, (see Creswell and Plano Clark
2010 or Dewaele and Salomidou 2017).
Corpus linguistics (CL) has guided the collection, mark-up and analysis of data
from the corpus by means of quantitative computer-assisted methodology. This
study would fit in the tradition which has come to be known as corpus assisteddiscourse studies (CADS), combining quantitative analyses of data and close
reading of individual texts or text-fragments (cf. Haugh 2010b; McEnery and
Wilson 2001; Santamarıa-Garcıa 2011; Partington 2014; Walsh et al. 2011).
Qualitative CA and DA resulted in the provision of concepts that served as tags
for text mark up and facilitated CL quantitative analysis and statistical treatment of
data. The use of a text-retrieval program, a typical tool for CL, allowed for the
testing and validation of hypotheses on data. In this case, O’Donnell’s (2011)
software UAM Corpus Tool 3.2 has been used.
Discourse has been tagged with labels for discourse acts, using Tsui’s (1994)
concept. She borrowed the act unit from Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) and
redefined it as “discourse act”, considering the important role of discourse in their
identification, as explained in Tsui (1994: 10). This author provides a rigorous
definition and comprehensive taxonomy of discourse acts. Her taxonomy has been
used in order to facilitate automatic searches for the most frequent discourse acts
contained in teacher discourse. Tsui (1994) classifies discourse acts into elicitations,
requestives, directives and informatives and each class is further classified into more
delicate subclasses. Elicitations are utterances which expect a verbal response in the
form of information, confirmation, agreement, commitment, repetition or clarifica-
tion. Requestives solicit non-verbal actions and give addressees the option of
carrying out the solicited action. They can request action in the form of permission,
Emotional and Educational Consequences of (Im)politeness… 243
123
proposals or invitations. Directives also solicit non-verbal actions but they do not
give addressees the option of carrying out the solicited action. Examples include
orders, warnings, advice, instructions or threats. Informatives have the function of
providing information and prospect “an acknowledgement of attention and
understanding” (Tsui 1994: 134). Informatives can be classified into reports,
assessments or expressives.
Mark up of the evaluative language has made use of appraisal categories
described in Table 2 for the expression of attitude including meanings of affect,
judgement and appreciation. Impoliteness types and politeness strategies have also
been included for automatic retrieval and analysis.
This combination of methods has allowed for both bottom up and top down
processes of analysis, thus overcoming one of the shortcomings most frequently
observed for corpus linguistics: “One criticism that has been levelled against
analysis based on concordance output is that the very methodology itself, in the
form of concordance and keyword searches, limits the analysis to a somewhat
atomized, bottom-up type of investigation of the corpus data” (Flowerdew 2004:
324).
Data Analysis and Discussion of Results
The data analysed for this article consist of a random sample of 200 discourse act
units from corpus 1 and 200 from corpus 2, plus the collection of 100 students’
reports contained in corpus 3. The corpus of classroom interaction and the corpus of
email and educational platform exchanges between teachers and students at higher
education have been tagged and searched for categories of discourse acts, appraisal
(attitude including meanings of affect, judgement and appreciation) and strategies of
(im)politeness. The results from their analysis have been contrasted for differences
and similarities. The corpus of 80,000 words from students’ recollections has been
analysed in order to illustrate the students’ perceptions on (im)politeness. This
collection is a valuable resource for finding out about individuals’ perception on
what has been face threatening and impolite and is used to complement the results
from the other corpora with valuable insights.
The results of the analysis of corpora 1 and 2 are presented in Table 3.
These results reveal that the discourse of teaching involves many potentially
threatening acts for students’ faces, performed as directives, requestives, elicitations
for information and negative assessments (108 of the discourse acts of teacher’s talk
in the classroom and 120 in virtual learning). Except for invitations, reports and
positive assessments, (92 discourse acts in classroom interaction and 80 in virtual
environments), the rest are all potential FTAs. Directives and requestives (not
including invitations) can threaten rapport by threatening students’ negative faces,
as they can affect freedom of action and equity and association rights. However, it is
important to consider that orders or requests are not always interpreted as
threatening. “If we perceive a directive as being within the scope of our obligations,
we are less likely to regard it as an infringement of our own rights” (Spencer-Oatey
2008: 19). This throws light on the fact that a powerful reason why many students
244 C. Santamarıa-Garcıa
123
Tab
le3
Frequency
ofdiscourseactsin
teacher
discoursein
classroom
interaction(CI)versuse-mailandvirtuallearning(E/V)expressed
inrawfrequencies
forasample
of400discourseactunitsin
T–Sinteraction
Directives
(Advisives,
mandatives)
Requestives
Elicitations(forinform
ation,
confirm
ation,clarification)
Inform
atives
TotalFTAS
Totalnon-threatening
acts
Permissionproposals
Invitations
Reports
Assessm
ents
+–
CI
12
22
456
50
38
18
108
92
56
E/V
24
18
240
50
28
38
120
80
66
Emotional and Educational Consequences of (Im)politeness… 245
123
may feel threatened by teachers’ discourse is that they do not accept obligations.
And this may be the case because, most probably, they lack both intrinsic and
extrinsic motivations and the inner acceptance of the value or utility of tasks, which
is necessary for extrinsic motivation to develop (Ryan and Deci 2000: 55). As these
authors observe, such lack of acceptance is frequently reflected in attitudes of
unwillingness and reluctance.
The criticisms contained in negative assessments (18 in classroom interaction vs.
38 in e-mail interaction) can deteriorate rapport if perceived as threatening students’
positive faces and their fundamental desire for others to evaluate them positively,
regarding their attributes concerning their face sensitivities and sense of worth,
dignity and identity associated with issues such as respect, honour, status, reputation
and competence. Regarding sociality rights negative assessments may be perceived
as threatening equity (not being treated fairly) unless the benefits of assessment are
seen. Hence, the importance for students to understand feedback in their own benefit
and for teachers to facilitate such understanding. As to association, it may affect
involvement and result in the judgement that the teacher is not sensitive towards
students’ feelings. When negative assessment damages students’ faces, it can result
in the very negative consequence of motivation loss, which requires a feeling of
competence, as explained above. However, assessment may be recognized as a
highly conventionalized process in teaching, and those students who perceive it as
such run fewer risks to lose face. On the contrary, positive assessments (38 in
classroom interaction and 28 in virtual learning) are face-enhancing discourse acts
and contribute to rapport.
Elicitations for information can threaten rapport by threatening students’ needs
for both positive and negative faces, especially, and with a higher rank of
imposition, when students don’t know the right answer to display questions. In this
case, elicitations may threaten students’ sense of equity rights if they feel they are
not treated fairly (“Teacher, you are always asking me”) and right of association if
feeling shamed. Embarrassment grows if there is audience because “face-
management norms seem to be ‘number-sensitive’” (Spencer-Oatey 2008: 36).
Feeling shamed goes against feelings of competence and can result in the very
negative consequence of motivation loss.
Differences can be observed between classroom interaction (CI) and email
communication in both electronic mail and virtual learning platforms (E/V), mainly
due to differences in the interactional goals involved, as email messages mostly deal
with assignment feedback. Therefore, the number of discourse acts produced for
assessing students’ performance is higher in E/V comunication (66 vs. 56). The
most relevant difference in relation to face considerations is that CI includes fewer
instances of negative assessments than E/V interaction (18 vs. 38). This is consistent
with the expectation that teachers make efforts to save students’ faces in public
settings, while leaving feedback for private communication by email, which
consequently may contain more potentially FTAs as a result.
Analysis of the relationship between discourse acts and attitudinal categories may
further illustrate why teachers’ discourse may be perceived as threatening and
impolite. When exploring the evaluative meanings underlying teachers’ discourse
acts, it seems that potential FTAs frequently convey negative attitudinal meanings
246 C. Santamarıa-Garcıa
123
of affect, judgement and appreciation, while acts that are non-threatening, or favour
the addressee’s needs for face, convey positive evaluative meanings. Tables 4 and 5
show results of the analysis of teachers’ discourse acts and the attitudinal meanings
conveyed by them in raw frequencies. No differentiation has been included in the
table between subcategories of affect, judgement and appreciation due to the limited
amount of data but they have been taken into consideration in the subsequent
discussion.
Directives and requestives in T–S interaction are commonly intended to satisfy a
teacher’s need and, therefore, may be interpreted by addressees as conveying some
type of negative affect (unhappiness, dissatisfaction or insecurity), as a presupposed
motivation for these acts, even if teachers’ needs are usually not personal but
derived from their roles, (most typically, requesting tasks and assignments to be
done). We can find 8 instances of directives and 18 of requestives conveying
negative affect in CI (for instance, “Could you please redo and resubmit your
essay?”, conveying dissatisfaction) and 12 directives, 14 requestives conveying
negative affect in E/V, while only 4 requestives in the form of invitations can be
seen to invoke positive affect in CI and 2 in E/V (for instance, satisfaction in “Will
you share your amazing experience with your classmates in the forum, please?”).
Regarding judgement of social sanction there is only one instance in (CI) (“Could
you please stay after class?”, later discussed as example 1, but 6 in E/V. It seems
judgements are avoided as much as possible by teachers, especially in the
classroom, in order to avoid face offence.
Appreciation with negative meaning can also be implicit in directives and
requestives, as in the case of a requestive to a student to revise and resubmit a task
(“Could you please revise and resubmit again?”). Negative appreciation is conveyed
in 3 directives in CI and in 6 directives and 4 requestives in E/V. What is important
Table 4 Attitude categories in teacher’s discourse acts in classroom interaction (CI) expressed in raw
frequencies in a sample of 200 discourse acts
Directives Requestives Elicitations Informatives
Reports Assessments
+ – + – + – + – + –
Affect 89 0 8 4 18 10 10 14 10 6 9
Judgement, social esteem
41
0 0 0 0 8 14 4 2 12 1
Judgement, social sanction
9
0 1 0 0 0 0 4 0 4 1
Appreciation 60 0 3 0 4 8 6 12 4 16 7
Totals Directives
12
Requestives
22 + invitations
4
Elicitations
56
Reports
50
Assessments
56
Informatives 106
Symbols “+” and “–” stand for positive and negative attitudinal meanings
Emotional and Educational Consequences of (Im)politeness… 247
123
to be considered here, regarding directives and requests, is that there are no positive
meanings conveyed, except in the case of invitations, which convey positive affect.
Teachers’ elicitations can convey positive attitude but quite frequently invoke
negative meanings. For instance, “How many types can you find, then?” after a
student has failed to give a correct reply, may invoke judgement of social esteem,
capacity type, conveying the student is not able to give an appropriate reply. A total
of 10 elicitations in CI and 6 in E/V have been analysed as instances of negative
judgement of social esteem, while others (14 and 10, respectively) seem to invoke
negative affect (especially when teachers express lack of satisfaction “Could we
improve this?”) or negative appreciation (6 and 4 instances, respectively) as with:
“How could this text be more precise?”.
Positive assessment can express positive affect with happiness (“So happy to hear
this”), satisfaction (“I’m impressed”) or security (“I knew you would manage”). The
three categories are presented under positive affect for the purpose of the present
research and amount to 6 discourse acts expressing positive assessment in CI and 7
in E/V.
Negative assessment is frequently performed by expressing negative categories
of affect: Unhappiness, dissatisfaction, insecurity, disinclination (9 in CI and 11 in
E/V) It can also express judgement of social esteem (negative expression of
normality, capacity, tenacity) (1 in CI and 6 in E/V) and judgement of social
sanction (negative expression of veracity, propriety) (1 in CI and 4 in E/V).
Appreciation can also be used in the expressions of negative reaction, composition
and valuation (7 and 17).
The data show that explicit, negative judgements are avoided, most probably
responding to teachers’ avoidance to damage students’ faces. However, invoked
judgements with negative meanings can be found and may be responsible for the
Table 5 Attitude categories in teacher’s discourse acts in e-mail and virtual learning (E/V) expressed in
raw frequencies in a sample of 200 discourse acts
Directives Requestives + invitations Elicitations Informatives
Report Assessments
+ – + – + – + – + –
Affect 88 0 12 2 14 10 7 17 8 7 11
Judgement, social
esteem 33
0 0 0 0 8 6 6 0 7 6
Judgement, social
sanction 19
0 6 0 0 1 2 2 0 4 4
Appreciation 60 0 6 0 4 2 4 12 5 10 17
Totals Directives
24
Requestives
18 + invitations 2
Elicitations
40
Reports
50
Assessments
66
Informatives 116
Symbols “+” and “–” stand for positive and negative attitudinal meanings
248 C. Santamarıa-Garcıa
123
interpretation of some acts as face threatening, even when they are formally polite.
Example (1) illustrates this case with the request by a teacher to two students to stay
after class.
(1) Example from classroom interaction
[Teacher addressing 2 students with disruptive behaviour during their first
class in the semester]:
1. Teacher: Could you, please, stay after class?
[The two students stay after their class mates have left and one of the
students addresses the teacher]
2. Student 1: Puedes dar gracias que no nos hemos ido.
You can thank us for not leaving.3. Teacher: Vamos a ver, se trata de que penseis si vuestra actitud va a
facilitar vuestro proceso de aprendizaje.
Well, this is just for you to reflect on your attitude and whether it willfacilitate your learning process.
4. Student 1: ¿Nos estas juzgando? [addressing his colleague] ¡Nos esta
juzgando la tıa! ¡Otra igual! ¡Estoy harto de que las tıas nos cojan manıa
por ser tıos!
Are you judging us? [addressing his colleague] I can’t believe this!! She isjudging us, this chick!! Just another one [teacher]! I’m really fed up thatfemale teachers take it against us just because we are boys!
Regardless of the politeness contained in “Could you please stay after the class?”
this request seems to damage students’ negative and positive faces, using Brown and
Levinson’s (1987) terminology, and their face sensitivities and rights of equity and
association, as defined by Spencer-Oatey (2008). The request imposes upon their
freedom to leave and implies a negative judgement of their behavior (social
sanction, propriety). The reply to the teacher in move 2 is face damaging for the
teacher’s relational face, as the authority in her role is challenged. They are staying
but not as an obligation, complying to her request in obedience. The student makes
it clear that they are staying as a favour and are asking for social payment in return,
in the form of gratitude. “You can thank us for not leaving”. Sociality rights of the
teacher to be treated fairly (principles of equity and association) are challenged but
also the students’ from their perspective. The teacher’s request that students reflect
on their attitude can also be presumed to have conveyed an offensive judgment of
social sanction, propriety type against their faces and sociality rights, considering
student 1’s reaction in move 4, and his explicit classification of the teachers’ action
as an unacceptable instance of judgement. His expression of dissatisfaction with the
behavior of this teacher together with the use of a derogatory term for her, shows a
clear orientation to rapport challenge. The teacher’s face is aggravated. Expecta-
tions regarding sociality rights and obligations were not fulfilled and interpersonal
rapport was affected.
Emotional and Educational Consequences of (Im)politeness… 249
123
This example has revealed that face aggravation may arise from invoked
meanings, even when politeness strategies have been used. “Could you please stay
after the class?” would not fit into Kaul de Marlangeon’s taxonomy for impoliteness
but has caused face aggravation to students. The student’s reply would fit into “Stint
on the politeness expected by the teacher”. After analysis of the corpus data, this has
been the most frequent category of impoliteness, amounting to 25 replies in CI and
39 in E/V, i.e. 64 discourse acts in the sample (16%). The rest of impolite acts have
been classified as “Formally polite with impolite effects” and amount to 16 replies
in CI and 23 in E/V, i.e. 39 discourse acts in the sample (9.75%).
Worth mentioning also, that conventional formulae for indirectness and negative
politeness, such as “Could you please…?” do not seem appropriate for teachers’
formulation of requests to Spanish students. In the 50 reports collected from Spanish
students, all of them agree that indirectness has the effect of increasing detachment
and associated coldness. Moreover, fulfilment of indirect requests tend to seem only
optional to them. On the contrary, the 50 students from USA and UK report feeling
shocked by the directness and camaraderie between teachers and students in Spain
and feel more at home with teachers who favour negative politeness. The distance
associated with negative politeness seems to result, for the Spanish students, into
two distinct types of reactions. In those cases in which teachers are strict, negative
politeness results in feelings of fear to authority and in those in which teachers seem
over considerate and not harsh enough to be feared, negative politeness is reported
to be associated with carelessness, negligence and laziness. As an example of fear,
this Spanish student reports on a strict teacher who had a clear preference for
negative politeness and indirectness: “We were also afraid of asking her because we
did not want to be humiliated by her reaction. All these attitudes made us feel
distant and had a negative influence on our learning”. As illustration of carelessness,
derived from negative politeness combined with a more flexible attitude, another
student reports: “I remember her requesting the assignments diminishing the force
of an utterance with questions like ‘Could you please bring a photo tomorrow?’ (…)
Sometimes I also felt that she gave deference by treating us as a superior”. As a
consequence of this, “students neither took her seriously nor paid attention to her
instructions. All of this leads [sic] to the loss of interest in the subject”. A further
consequence reported is that learning is hindered: “In the end, we did not learn
anything from this subject. Therefore, the conversational style of this teacher did not
have a positive effect on my learning”. Another student reports on a similar
circumstance at higher education level:
However, the way how she used to talk to us, and assign activities could be
confusing because she tended to use expressions such as “I hope this is fine
with you…”, “I´m sorry to cause you any stress but…”. (…) Unfortunately,
some students misinterpreted this kind of instruction, and became very relaxed
about handing in projects. Several classmates thought that this use of negative
politeness meant that she would be relaxed about collecting homework, when
in fact she was quite strict with deadlines.
250 C. Santamarıa-Garcıa
123
Another student shows her preference for positive politeness and the use of bald on
record strategies for directives while feeling anxiety as a consequence of negative
politeness with this comment:
Teacher A made me feel that there was not social distance between us by using
on-record strategies and being direct, but reminding us that he was still the
teacher and so, the leader of the classroom, marking like this the existence of
some power distance. Regarding teacher B, her constant usage of strategies for
not threatening our face usually made me nervous. We were in 2nd of
Bachillerato, and I (in particular), but also some classmates I have talked to,
wanted to be said what to do and how to do it in the most direct way so we
could do it successfully. Thus, having the teacher not being straight to the
point, we did not like”.
These examples show that pragmalinguistic conventions affect pragmatic meaning
and deserve a more detailed study on their own.
Conclusions
The discourse of teaching typically contains many rapport sensitive discourse acts,
such as directives, elicitations and negative assessments, whose face-aggravating
potential increases when conveying negative evaluative language. The use of
politeness strategies is not always a guarantee for the mitigation of their potential
damage because several factors have an influence in the interpretation of face
aggravation such as the risks involved in face loss, sociality rights/obligations and
interactional goals. Some negative meanings, which may not be explicit in the
message but implicit in teachers’ discourse, may result in the calculation by students
of a high cost for them. Consequently, they may react with rapport challenging
orientations. Lack of motivation and unwillingness to accept obligations may also
be, at least partly, responsible for the interpretation of negative meanings in
teachers’ discourse.
Results stress the importance that teachers and students become aware of the
fundamental importance of the language used in their interaction, both in the
classroom and virtual learning environments, because the interaction generated has
effects not only on the relationships created among them but on the teaching–
learning process and academic achievement. Motivation can be undermined by the
students’ feelings of lack of competence, relatedness and autonomy, which may be
inferred from teachers’ discourse acts. Lack of competence and relatedness can be
inferred from criticisms while lack of autonomy can result from directives and
requests of various kinds. From all this, it seems that T–S interaction, and more
specifically, (im)politeness and rapport management, may also count as an
important variable for the exploration of academic achievement together with
students’ motivational beliefs, classroom context, and students’ behaviors.
Considering self-determination and politeness theories together, we have
observed that even if teachers’ directives or negative assessments are performed
for the benefit of students in order for them to increase their competence, students
Emotional and Educational Consequences of (Im)politeness… 251
123
may take offence when lacking acceptance of the formative value of teachers’
actions. On the contrary, when students assume that teachers care for them and for
their learning, chances are higher that teachers’ directives and negative judgements
are interpreted as attempts at helping them achieve their learning targets.
Regarding sociality rights, negative assessments may be perceived as threatening
equity (not being treated fairly) unless the benefits of assessment are seen. Hence,
the importance for students to understand feedback in their own benefit and for
teachers to facilitate such understanding. As to association, it may affect
involvement and result in the judgement that the teacher is not sensitive towards
student’s feelings. When negative assessment damages students’ face, it can result
in the very negative consequence of loss of motivation, which requires a feeling of
competence, as explained above.
The data from students’ reports illustrate that the conventional formulae for
indirect polite requests do not seem appropriate for Spanish students who seem to
associate negative values of either detachment or permissiveness to them. A more
detailed forthcoming study of the pragmalinguistic conventions which affect
pragmatic meaning and rapport will throw light on this interesting phenomenon.
Acknowledgements This paper has been written while doing research for the project “EMO-FUNDETT:
EMOtion and language ‘at work’: The discursive emotive/evaluative FUNction in DiffErent Texts and
contexts within corporaTe and institutional work”, I+D FFI2013-47792-C2-1-P, sponsored by the
Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and directed by Dr. Laura Alba Juez (UNED, Spain) http://
www2.uned.es/proyectofundett. I also want to thank all the students and teachers who have contributed to
the data in the corpora under compilation. Their identity is kept anonymous for respect of their privacy.
Special thanks to Alexander J. Lenton for providing examples of English usage referring to the perception
of teachers by students.
Compliance with Ethical Standards
Conflict of interest The author states that there is no conflict of interest.
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