Date of Award
12-1-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D. in Second Language Studies
First Advisor
Felice Coles
Second Advisor
Michael Raines
Third Advisor
Asmaa Shehata
School
University of Mississippi
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
This study examines how Arabic-speaking Jordanian male graduate students at an American university in Mississippi employ request directness strategies and modifications as polite devices in oral English, and how American native speakers perceive these requests. Drawing on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness Theory and the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project taxonomy (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989a, 1989b), this study employed a mixed-methods design to examine request production and perception. Data were collected from six American English native speakers from Mississippi and six Arabic-speaking Jordanian international students, all at the same university, through six discourse completion tasks, six role-plays, and semi-structured interviews. 18 American raters from Mississippi, divided into three groups of 6 evaluated the politeness of the first 144 requests from the 192 elicited samples using a 7-point Likert scale. Follow-up semi-structured interviews with 10 raters provided qualitative insights into the factors underlying their politeness judgments. The analysis revealed systematic differences in request formulation: Jordanian participants favored ability-oriented queries with verb “can”, strong hints, the politeness marker “please,” and post-headed grounding modifiers, whereas American native speakers preferred willingness-oriented queries modified with consultative devices and pre-headed grounding moves. In 11 out of 12 tasks, the Jordanians’ requests were rated as less polite than Americans’ requests. 24 out of the 72 Jordanians’ rated requests received mean scores below the neutral midpoint of 4.0, indicating perceived impoliteness, with the strongest negative ratings occurring in unequal-power contexts and equal-power situations with marked social distance. A striking perception gap emerged: 18 of the 24 Jordanian-produced requests rated towards impoliteness by American raters were perceived as polite by the Jordanians themselves, indicating negative pragmatic transfer from Jordanian Arabic politeness conventions. Despite Jordanian participants’ use of “please” and conventionally indirect forms, American raters evaluated these requests towards the impolite side of the scale due to external modifications that failed to acknowledge the addressee. Findings contribute to the research on requests by identifying subclasses within the conventionally indirect request strategies and suggest pedagogical applications for English-as-a-foreign-language classroom, particularly for Jordanian Arabic speakers.
Recommended Citation
Henen, David, "Asking Nicely: Americans’ Perception of Jordanian Arabic Speakers’ Politeness When Making Requests in English" (2025). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3517.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/3517