Politeness - a Carefully Constructed Interface Used in Professional Communication
Politeness - a Carefully Constructed Interface Used in Professional Communication

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims at proposing a tailored face management model that may be applied by modern language instructors to business communication courses as part of a sustained common departmental effort to include the realities of today’ s marketplace students have to work in into the realities of a comprehensive academic course. The Business Communication Course taught within the Department of Modern Languages and Business Communication, Faculty of Economics, “Babes-Bolyai” University Cluj-Napoca1 fosters acquisition of sound theoretical support and practical insights into how professional communication works in companies that value dynamic communicators capable of creative inputs. We suggest a reinterpretation of the objectives of this course in accordance with pragmatic politeness approaches that present the construct of politeness as the interface that mediates effective communication. Firstly, we revisit some important pragmatic politeness conceptualisations in order to offer theoretical framework to our research. Secondly, we briefly introduce important characteristics of professional discourse differentiating it from other types of discourse. Finally, we refer to a practical application, a Case Study (Students and Politeness), that was carried out on students in economics in order to better frame the face management model against their relevant feedback. The application is based on a semi-controlled face-to-face interview and is categorized under qualitative research. Our contention is that the obtained feedback offers valuable support in putting forward a politeness-based model for business communication courses beneficiaries.

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