Politeness and In-Directness in Algerian and Russian Classroom Requests

Successful intercultural communication depends on the interlocutors’ understanding of their pragmatic utterances and intended meaning. However, practi-cal use of languages varies across cultures given the difference in cultural values and norms leading to different language means and politeness strategies applied in identical situations of intercultural communication. This article presents the findings of a contrastive analysis of politeness and (in)directness formulae used by Algerian and Russian students and teachers in classroom requests. It aims to find similarities and/ or differences in directness vs. indirectness and politeness in requests in two different cultural contexts and to investigate the impact of socio-cultural factors in these situa-tions. A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) method was used to collect data, whereby three situations were proposed to 148 respondents (53 Russian and 95 Algerian par-ticipants). The findings revealed that Russian and Algerian students adopted conventional indirect strategies when requesting their teachers. In comparison, impositives (direct strategies) were most frequently used by both Algerian and Russian teachers. Russian students used indirect request when communicating with their classmates, while Algerian students chose to request their fellow students directly. The results also showed that Russians used non-conventional indirectness to the least degree, while at the same time they scored high levels of conventional indirectness. The findings prove that politeness does not necessarily mean indirectness, and directness does not imply impoliteness. The study provides new data on the impact of socio-cultural factors on the levels of directness and politeness. It contributes to cross-cultural pragmatics and studies on classroom discourse. © Sarra Saadna, 2024.