Politeness Strategies in Making Request on the Telephone

Abstract

This paper attempts to analyze and compare the language of requests made on the telephone by native speakers of English and Japanese speakers of English in terms of their politeness strategies. Each of these groups consisted of four subjects who were involved in two tasks, where role-play was used to elicit the conversation data. The first task was to make a request of her/his professor to write a letter of recommendation and the second task was to make a request of her/his friend to proofread a paper. It was found that native speakers of English used various politeness strategies to maintain a desirable human relationship in each situation. On the other hand, Japanese speakers of English used very few of these politeness strategies, which night lead to a negative image of the speaker, the paper concludes with the implications of this research for English education and with the call for farther research in discourse analysis of daily conversation.