Abstract

Disagreement is generally done in opposition to a speaker's claim, in an educational context it can be defined as a student's verbal or non-verbal opposition to classmates' or the teacher's stance that emerge through different instructional and non-instructional situations. The purpose of the study is to qualitatively examine Egyptian undergraduates' disagreements with participants of different power relations in EFL classrooms from a politeness theory perspective. The study introduces Egyptian EFL classrooms as a new context for studying the interface of power and politeness in disagreements in general and for exploring the impact of other variables such as context, social distance and type of interactional activities on the realization of disagreements. Data were collected through videotaping two classes of business-English, with a total of 18 hours of observation. In addition, interviews were conducted with a sub-set of the participants to gather in-depth information about the students’ pragmatic choices and a questionnaire evaluating social distance between peers was administered to all participants. In the 18 hours of data collected, 34 students expressed 90 turns of disagreement; 35 of these were directed to the teacher, while 55 were to peers. Spontaneous disagreements were coded and categorized according to the Brown and Levinson (1987) politeness theory using Rees-Miller’s (2000) taxonomy, adapted here to include strategies from Muntigl and Turnbull's (1998) taxonomy. Analysis of the data showed that although students employed various positive and negative politeness strategies to soften disagreements when addressing power superiors, students employed many aggravated disagreements when discussing the teachers' language input .The use of different negative politeness strategies and aggravated disagreements between peers were attributed to social distance and the type of interactional activities. The findings of this study might help provide some insight into the aspects that should be incorporated into the teaching of pragmatics in EFL classrooms.

Department

Applied Linguistics Department

Degree Name

MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

Graduation Date

2-1-2015

Submission Date

January 2016

First Advisor

Plumlee, Marilyn

Committee Member 1

Gebril, Atta

Committee Member 2

Agameya, Amira

Extent

145 p.

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Rights

The author retains all rights with regard to copyright. The author certifies that written permission from the owner(s) of third-party copyrighted matter included in the thesis, dissertation, paper, or record of study has been obtained. The author further certifies that IRB approval has been obtained for this thesis, or that IRB approval is not necessary for this thesis. Insofar as this thesis, dissertation, paper, or record of study is an educational record as defined in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) (20 USC 1232g), the author has granted consent to disclosure of it to anyone who requests a copy.

Institutional Review Board (IRB) Approval

Approval has been obtained for this item

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