POLITENESS STRATEGY ON STUDENTS’ PODCAST: A PRAGMATIC STUDY FOR SPEAKING LEARNING
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22460/eltin.v14i1.p69-78Abstract
Speaking skills constitute a basic component of English language mastery; yet many tertiary-level EFL students demonstrate insufficient performance in interactive spoken tasks. This study investigates the deployment of politeness strategies in English-language student podcasts and examines their implications for speaking skill development among college students at a private university in Bandung, Indonesia. Adopting a descriptive qualitative approach, data were sourced from students’ recorded podcast assignments on themes such as “English for Global Career”, “Students’ Hobbies, Interests, and Talents”. Transcriptions of the student utterances were coded into the four politeness strategy categories proposed by Brown & Levinson (1987): positive politeness, negative politeness, bald-on-record, and off-record. Results show that 56.25% of utterances employ positive politeness, 18.75% negative politeness, 18.75% bald-on-record, and 6.25% off-record. The findings suggest that politeness strategies function as an effective medium for improving speaking skills by promoting interactional engagement, argument construction, and critical response. The study contributes to applied pragmatics and offers pedagogical insights for improving students’ communicative and pragmatic competence in EFL speaking tasks.
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