Chiba2020
| Chiba2020 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Chiba2020 |
| Author(s) | Akiko Chiba |
| Title | ‘It’s like a game’: An investigation of facework in ELF academic disagreement |
| Editor(s) | Cynthia Lee |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Lingua franca, Disagreement, Face, Interview, Hong Kong |
| Publisher | |
| Year | 2020 |
| Language | English |
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| URL | Link |
| DOI | |
| ISBN | 9781003008903 |
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| Howpublished | |
| Book title | Second Language Pragmatics and English Language Education in East Asia |
| Chapter | |
Abstract
With the increasing use of English as a common language in internationalised academia today, university students from different linguacultural backgrounds may confront face threats when expressing opposing ideas during classwork, as cultural differences in how disagreements are viewed and enacted have been reported. Moving beyond the widely accepted notion of facework as a politeness strategy, this chapter explores other factors that inform facework when disagreeing in an ELF academic context. Twelve hours of academic group discussion were collected at a university in Hong Kong and examined, using a combination of corpus linguistics and conversation analysis. Semi-structured interviews were then held with 12 selected participants. The interview data revealed that disagreement in academic tasks is not necessarily face-threatening. However, the predominance of mitigated disagreement and the use of combined mitigation strategies, together with the participants’ reluctance about disagreement in general, suggest participants’ high sensitivity to disagreement and their cautiousness in enacting this speech act. Some conflicting and overlapping attributes were found to affect facework in academic disagreement, highlighting the complex and multifunctional nature of face. Implications for ELF classroom practices will be discussed.
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