“Politeness and intercultural communication through academic writing” by Junichi Toyota

Presentation from Day 1 of International seminar 2021 organised by CLIL-HET project.

About

Title: Politeness and intercultural communication through academic writing
Presentation by: Junichi Toyota
Recorded on: 11 March 2021

Abstract

Politeness is omnipresent in various forms in each culture in the world, and it plays a vital role in our society, allowing us to perform smooth interactions with others. At the same time, it can pose some serious problems once linguistic or cultural boundaries are crossed. Such problems can be also found among students learning a new language. This paper analyses various issues concerning politeness in L2 learning in the context of EAP, particularly focusing on the case of Japanese students leaning English at the ternary education. Both English and Japanese have intricate systems of politeness achieved by various linguistic means such as the passive, and Japanese learners often encounter difficulties in academic writing in English, where politeness in Japanese interferes with controlling self-assertiveness in subjective opinions. It is discussed here how such cases can be dealt with in EAP.