Politeness through the Prism of Requests, Apologies and Refusals: A Case of Advanced Serbian EFL Learners

The challenges that EFL learners, teachers and teacher educators are facing today have increased considerably with the comparatively new role of English as the lingua franca of the modern world. For both learners and teachers, responding to these new demands involves mastering a broader set of communication skills and a wider range of competencies in English, L2 pragmatic competence being only one of them, albeit an extremely significant one. With this in mind, Politeness through the Prism of Requests, Apologies and Refusals explores various aspects of Serbian EFL learners' (future EFL teachers') pragmatic knowledge and metapragmatic awareness, both as elements of their communicative competence and as tools they can use to support their own students' L2 pragmatic development. In addition to examining the language strategies they resort to in different communicative contexts and the reasoning behind their speech act strategy choice, this book also investigates the use of intonation to express and interpret pragmatic meanings.As one of the first steps towards assembling the complex jigsaw puzzle representing the pragmatic competence of Serbian learners of English, the book will be of considerable interest to researchers investigating aspects of L2 pragmatics in the speech of EFL learners, especially those with Slavic L1 backgrounds. Additionally, in offering an insight into the numerous challenges that future language professionals, including EFL teachers, face in the process of mastering L2 speech acts, the book will also be relevant to university EFL lecturers and teacher trainers.

About the Author :
Milica Savić, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Niš, Serbia, and Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Languages at the University of Stavanger, Norway. She has published a number of research papers on EFL students' metapragmatic awareness, peer assessment, pronunciation instruction, EFL teaching and teacher education. Her research interests include interlanguage pragmatics, interlanguage phonology, linguistic politeness, and various aspects of EFL instruction.

Review :
"The volume provides a very comprehensive preview of the research carried out on (im)politeness and speech acts. In this regard, both traditional and postmodern approaches to (im)politeness, including their strengths and drawbacks, are fully discussed. The literature review on speech acts also provides an excellent summary of the general characteristics and classification systems of requests, apologies and refusals. Both of these discussions can be very informative for postgraduates and researchers interested in this area. The book could be of interest to researchers, English language teachers and teacher trainers involved in the field of interlanguage pragmatics. The results of the research can particularly be of interest to teachers of English who teach to Slavic-speaking learners."—Leila Khabbazi-Oskouei, University of East Anglia; LINGUIST List 26.541 "[This book] is an outstanding study of politeness in the field of interlanguage pragmatics. Embracing a range of up-to-date theoretical frameworks and methodological procedures, the author successfully tackles a number of unsolved issues in EFL pragmatics. The conclusions the author reaches on the basis of extensive empirical data are an invaluable source not only to academics, but also to EFL teachers, teacher trainers and advanced learners of English."—Prof. Dr. Maja Marković, University of Novi Sad, Serbia"This book ... represents a more than welcome contribution to the study of interlanguage pragmatics, offering both an extensive critical discussion of the relevant theoretical aspects of this complex topic and an exceptionally thorough empirical study of the problem."—Prof. Dr. Tatjana Paunović, University of Niš, Serbia"The book will certainly be of interest to advanced students and teachers of EFL and applied linguistics. In other words, it is a must-read for students studying to be future language professionals."—Prof. Dr. Gordana Petričić, University of Novi Sad, Serbia