Politeness in language teaching: A case study of textbooks for Chinese as a second/foreign language

The aim of this paper is to offer a critical overview of how politeness is presented in a sample of textbooks used in teaching Chinese as a second/foreign language. The importance of politeness in second language acquisition has long been recognized in the literature; previous research in this area on the acquisition and teaching of CSL/CFL has focussed e.g. on language socialization, on pragmatics, and on the development of intercultural communicative competence. However, specific research on how politeness and politeness-related topics and skills are introduced in textbooks and other works used by learners and teachers of CSL/CFL suffers from a lack of systematicity. To this end, we analysed a sample of teaching materials designed for non-native speakers which are widely used in China (and beyond). We shall show that explicit discussion of politeness is limited, and that often the dialogues do not offer enough indirect evidence for a thorough understanding of politeness. We shall argue that this is suggestive of an approach to language pedagogy in which politeness is not really seen as linguistic senso strictu, and hence teaching the structures of the language is not effectively integrated with the pragmatic aspects related to politeness in interaction.