The Effect of Teaching Politeness Maxims on EFL Learners’ Redundancy in Writing Complaint Letters

One of the essential concepts in language pedagogy which currently has received considerable attention is sociolinguistics; related to this vast area in ۱۹۷۸ the concepts of 'face' and 'politeness' were developed by Brown and Levinson. The claim was that in social settings, either formal or informal, residents apply various strategies to protect the face of others when addressing them. Research supports the idea that politeness is universal but culture-bound. The Politeness Maxims are also applicable in writing systems. Some learners transfer spoken habits- especially redundant phrases- to their witting system. The study focuses on teaching politeness maxims to second language learners to find out whether teaching these maxims would affect EFL learners' redundancy avoidance in writing complaint letters or not. The present study investigated the effect of teaching Tact and Generosity politeness Maxims on EFL learners ’Redundancy in Writing Complaint Letters. A quasi-experimental design was used. The participants were ۳۴ upper-intermediate females at Khane-ye-zaban Institute in Hamedan. The students were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. To analyze the data, Mann-Whitney U test was used to find the difference between these two groups. The findings show that teaching politeness maxims affect EFL learners' ability to interact better in social and communicative settings and they perform better in writing complaint letters.

کلیدواژه ها:

Complaint Letters ، Politeness Maxims ، Redundancy