ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 examines how an understanding of FL politeness and culture can help bilingual speakers achieve personal, interactional and transactional objectives. Politeness as a form of individual and social action helps interlocutors negotiate the rough and tumble of everyday interaction by providing a working framework for relating to others. Meanwhile culture reflects ways of thinking and acting that reflect societal values and beliefs. FL users need to be aware that politeness and cultural behaviour may be expressed both verbally and nonverbally. Therefore interlocutors face both verbal and nonverbal choices (and limitations) regarding how they want to establish, develop, consolidate and maintain social and transactional relationships. As a form of social and cultural action, choices emanate from interactants’ experiences and attitudes as they determine how they want to construct TL relationships. To understand bilingual interactants’ decision-making processes, this chapter examines how politeness theory can inform TL interactional practices and provide insights into prosocial and interactional politeness behaviour. Prosocial politeness also underscores the importance of raising bilingual speakers’ sense of (critical) language awareness when making personal, interactional and transactional choices.
