LES STRATEGIES DE POLITESSE PRATIQUÉES DANS LES ACTES DE LANGAGE PAR LES ÉTUDIANTS INDIENS DE FLE

Politeness is not a universal concept, as the rules vary across cultures. Ever since Brown and Levinson (1978) introduced the concept based on the nation of facework, it has been the subject of debate among many researchers (Kasper and Blum-Kulka, 1983). Moreover, politeness is crucial for foreign language learners as it formnegral part of their spoken skills, especially in verbal interactions through conversations and role plays in the classroom. However, in practice, they receive variable attention during lessons, as activities favouring spoken French sometimes overlook the discursive significance of learners' utterances, especially in the absence of appropriate speech acts. In this paper, that draws on pragmatic theories, I propose to adopt an intercultural perspective, to offer some avenues for reflection on the issues of politeness strategies used by Indian learners in spoken activities in the French language classroom. Speech acts such as apologies, requests and thank-yous, drawn from an experiment conducted in the classroom, will be cited and analysed. It has been generally observed that the Indian learners employ a wide range of speech acts corresponding to polite formulas, beyond ritualized expressions. However, they would benefit, independently of their language proficiency, from explicit explanations on specific politeness principles for more effective pragmatic communication in their verbal interactions in the foreign language.