Facilitating or Limiting?
The Role of Politeness in How
Students Participate
in an Online Classroom
Discussion
Ming-Lung Yang, Yu-Jung Chen, Minseong Kim,
Yi-Fan Chang, An-Chih Cheng, Yangjoo Park,
Treavor Bogard, and Michelle Jordan
N97C0022
Christine
＊Introduction
Newlands, Anderson, & Mullin ( 2003):
CMD (Computer-mediated classroom discussion)
is an online forum in which participants co-construct
meaning, representing an example of a social
situation in which literacy (reading and writing
abilities) is required to negotiate meaning.
 Knobel & Lankshear, Leu (2005):
New literacies: the dispositions and practices needed
to engage with computer-mediated and
technologically-enhanced information and
communication tasks.

＊Introduction
 Brown
& Levinson (1987), Morand & Ocker
(2003): Politeness as a discourse framework is
rooted in the work of Goffman (1955).
cited in Morand & Ocker (2003):
In Goffman’s view, politeness issues arise when
individuals, while Interacting with one another, want
to “create certain impressions in others to appear
smooth and competent in their role of performances,
to be perceived as appropriately heedful and
supportive of others’ performances.”

＊Introduction
Brown and Levinson (1987):
Three main politeness strategies
(1)positive politeness, showing an appreciation of
something that the speaker believes the listener
would like to hear
(2)negative politeness, attempting to reduce any
imposition on the hearers
(3)off-record (indirect) , making a statement that
the listener can interpret either as an imposition or
not

＊Introduction
Chun (1994) and Darhower (2002) found that
students spent a great deal of time in greeting
and leave-taking when interacting in CMD.

Indirect communication was largely used to save
face by the students in order to avoid being
embarrassed by others’ rejection and disagreement.
 Four types of cues to an author’s emotions:
sound rendering (hehe), physical actions (*kiss*),
emphasis (no, I *won’t* go), and emotions such as
 to indicate a smiling face.

＊Introduction
Schallert and colleagues (2004):
learning could evidenced from the actual
words students used in the CMD and from
their self-assessments of learning.
They provided several categories of
learning, clarification, collaborative
expansion, integration,application, and
alternative interpretation.

＊ Definition
Learning is both social and personal, originating in
interaction with cultural and social practices but
internalized in an active, goal-directed manner. Conflict
and disturbance can act as an impetus for the learning
process (e.g.Almasi, 1995; Chan, Burtis, & Bereitet,
1997) and learning is more likely to occur when
learners hold an engaged, open stance to the new
ideas being entertained (e.g. Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000).
 Learning was evidenced when students clarified
their existing understanding or offered personal
examples of new insights they had freshly constructed
from reading others’ comments

＊ Definition
 Politeness
theory terms :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politeness_theory
The concepts derive from Brown and Levison
(1987) and begin with the concept of face, or the
self-image of human beings in their social
interactions. Face wants or needs are said to
drive interactions with others, and face-saving as
well as face-threatening and losing face are
important concerns of all humans.

＊ Definition
 Politeness
theory terms :
 The concern for face-saving leads individuals
to worry about the negative and positive face
needs of others as they interact with them.
 The positive face of either the speaker (or writer in
an online environment) or hearer (reader) will be
threatened if someone must disagree with
someone else.
 Anytime a face-threatening act (FTA) is being
planned, the speaker (writer) must carefully word
what is said in order to soften the threat or lessen
the risk of losing face.
＊ Definition
 Politeness
theory terms :
Positive politeness strategies are all about redressing
the threatened face needs of the hearer (reader) by
implying what the speaker (writer) is saying does
indeed fulfill the needs and wants of the hearer (reader).
 Negative politeness strategies are used to reduce the
threat to the hearer (reader) by minimizing the seeming
imposition of what the speaker (writer) is stating.
 Positive politeness revolves around an awareness of
the self-image needs of the hearer (reader) and
negative politeness reflects an awareness of the
autonomy needs of the hearer (reader).

＊ Research Questions

RQ1: What politeness strategies students
and their teacher would use in an
asynchronous online discussion?

RQ2: What evidence of learning we could
find particularly related to the use of
politeness strategies?

RQ3: In what ways would the use of
politeness strategies limit students’
learning?
＊ Method
◆ Participants
 the
instructor
 graduate students — 32 (12M, 20F),
including 11 interactional students
(Korea=4, China=3, Taiwan=2, Middle
East=1, and Philippines=1)
＊ Method
◆ procedure
1.Three required online discussion used a web-based
software (Blackboard) to organize and deliver postings.
Students were divided into four groups of seven or eight
with group reading assignments, such as motivation,
learning and social-cultural views which were posted by
the teacher.
2.Students were asked to post at least three comments
within 36 hours.
3.The teacher entered into the conversation of all groups
and attempted to respond to every student at least once.
＊ Method
◆ Data Sources and Classroom Activities
(From the second discussion)
Three data sources:
(1)The printout of the written discussion of
all four groups(44 messages for G1, 50 for
G2, 56 for G3, and 46 for G4)
 (2)The transcript of a follow-up, in-class
activity designed by the teacher
 (3)The assigned self-analysis essays the
students turned in at the end of the
semester

＊ Method
◆ Data Analysis
(1)Transcripts of the written conversation—
developing a codebook for the 25 politeness
strategies—15 positive and 10 negative
adapted from Brown and Levinson(1987) for
the written online medium.
 (2)Transcripts of oral in-class activity—looking
for instances of students indicating the
politeness constraints or issues of face saving
and how they were describing the kind of
learning happened during discussion and inclass activity.
 (3)Self-analysis essays—students were asked
to describe their own experience of the
discussion and to response to open-ended
questions.

＊ Results
◆ Part 1: Politeness strategies
(1)Politeness is a special concern in a CMD
environment.
(2)The different politeness strategies were not all
used to an equal degree.
(3)Positive politeness strategies were used almost
two times more often than positive strategies in
the particular online written discussion. Positive
politeness strategies are invoked what the writer
choose wording to indicate he or she is
addressing the self-image needs or wants of the
reader.
＊ Results
◆ Part 2: Politeness strategies Facilitating Learning
 Encouraging deeper thinking and
reorganization.
 Increasing students’ willingness to
participate by creating a safe
environment.
 Motivating students’ participation by
fulfilling students’ desire to receive
feedback for their ideas and questions.
＊ Results
◆ Part 3: Politeness Strategies Impeding Learning
From “self-analysis essay data”: Students
frequently reported their concerns about saving
face led them not to state their students’ thoughts
and feelings ,decreased some students’
participation in the discussion and even affected
the length of messages.
From “in-class activity for G3”: Students want to
save their own and the reader’s face, they
negotiate meaning and even challenge ideas. The
negotiation process may become thwarted or
stopped altogether, and learning may be hindered.
＊ Discussion
 Conclusion:



1. Politeness framework was useful in
understanding the processes learners experience
as they construct ongoing discourse.
2. The use of politeness strategies can motivate
students’ participation in the learning process. A
safe environment is also important
3. Politeness strategies were intricately
interwoven in the discourse used by students,
sometimes facilitating and sometimes interfering
with the needs students had to negotiate their
incipient understandings of difficult course
constructs.
＊ Discussion
 Implication:


1.Politeness strategies are commonly used in
daily life, we have to note even in the “private”
data source, the students’ retrospective thinkloud and their self-analysis essays, it’s possible
that students also applied politeness strategies
and may not have said all that they wanted to
say.
2. In future research, it would be interesting to
determine whether politeness is differently
influential in different language/culture groups.