Impoliteness Strategies in Interactions between Teenage EFL Learners and Teachers in the Classroom Context

Impoliteness is one of the most important aspects of interpersonal communication. This study sought to investigate impoliteness strategies in classroom interaction between EFL teachers and intermediate EFL learners ranging from 13 to 19 in age. To this end, six sessions of these classes were audio recorded in three Institute in different cities in Iran. The talks were transcribed and content analyzed to discover the impolite strategies. Afterwards, frequency and percentage analysis was used to find the most and the least frequent impoliteness strategies following Culpeper’s (1996) classification. The overall findings of the current study revealed that ignorance and failure to attend others’ interest, needs, and wants were the most commonly used type of impoliteness strategies in both teachers and learners’ talk. Furthermore, the least frequent impoliteness strategies in teachers’ talk included disassociate from the other; patronizing behavior; making the other feel uncomfortable. The least frequent strategies in learners’ talk were posed in four strategies: negative expressions; creativity impoliteness, using idioms, or expressions; complaints; unpalatable questions and/or presuppositions. As revealed by the results of the study, impoliteness strategies can be of significance in classroom interactions since the awareness of impoliteness strategies can enhance the quality of teacher-student interactions.