The role of politeness in apology sequences: How to maintain harmony between speakers

Abstract

The goal of the present paper is to provide a discourse-based teaching approach for the integration of the speech act of apologies from a communicative perspective. In so doing, special attention is paid to how sociocultural norms affect language use. The rationale behind the selection of this speech act is based on the fact that the realisation of this pragmatic aspect might be complex for learners of English as a Second/Foreign Language (SL/FL) not only when selecting appropriate utterances, but also in assessing what an offense involves and its severity (Bergman and Kasper, 1993). Taking these aspects into account, this paper provides first a review of politeness theory, then, a description of the speech act under investigation is presented, and finally, pedagogical implications regarding the integration of apologies in the second/foreign language classroom are suggested.