Would you please say that politely?: Teaching adult basic education English language learners to make polite requests

Abstract

This study examined the effectiveness of teaching adult basic education (ABE) English language learners (ELLs) how to make polite requests in the workplace and beyond. The participants represented 12 different countries and 11 languages. They were enrolled in a highintermediate level English language class in the evening program of a large-urban ABE program. Participants’ pragmatic ability with regard to making requests was assessed through a discourse completion test (DCT) administered as a pretest, followed by instruction in pragmatics (with a focus on requesting) and then by another DCT similar to the first one serving as a posttest. The pre- and posttest results were compared, with the analysis focusing on the relative frequency of explicitly-taught syntactic and lexical mitigators. Participants’ responses to a course evaluation questionnaire were also collected and analyzed. Findings indicated that while participants were aware of the use of modal verbs to show politeness prior to treatment, there was a noticeable increase in forms virtually absent in the pretest data, namely, lexical and syntactic mitigators explicitly taught. Additionally, findings showed high attendance contributed to an increase use of those mitigators. Participants responded favorably to the instructional techniques and felt that they had increased their knowledge about requesting, as well as their ability to make polite requests. The results of this instructional pragmatics study contribute to a relatively small body of literature involving the effectiveness of teaching second-language (L2) pragmatics to an ABE English language learner population.