Politeness through the Prism of Requests, Apologies and Refusals : A Case of Advanced Serbian EFL Learners

The challenges that EFL learners, teachers and teacher educators are facing today have increased considerably with the comparatively new role of English as the lingua franca of the modern world. For both learners and teachers, responding to these new demands involves mastering a broader set of communication skills and a wider range of competencies in English, L2 pragmatic competence being only one of them, albeit an extremely significant one. With this in mind, Politeness through the Prism of Requests, Apologies and Refusals explores various aspects of Serbian EFL learners’ (future EFL teachers’) pragmatic knowledge and metapragmatic awareness, both as elements of their communicative competence and as tools they can use to support their own students’ L2 pragmatic development. In addition to examining the language strategies they resort to in different communicative contexts and the reasoning behind their speech act strategy choice, this book also investigates the use of intonation to express and interpret pragmatic meanings.As one of the first steps towards assembling the complex jigsaw puzzle representing the pragmatic competence of Serbian learners of English, the book will be of considerable interest to researchers investigating aspects of L2 pragmatics in the speech of EFL learners, especially those with Slavic L1 backgrounds. Additionally, in offering an insight into the numerous challenges that future language professionals, including EFL teachers, face in the process of mastering L2 speech acts, the book will also be relevant to university EFL lecturers and teacher trainers.