Rating impoliteness in EFL: Results from an experiment with TV series

This contribution is part of a wider project aimed at ascertaining the merits of explicit teaching of pragmatic issues in EFL classes. More specifically, after reflecting on the importance of teaching pragmatics, and (im)politeness in particular, especially to advanced learners of English, the result of an experiment carried out with different groups of EFL students are discussed, with a view to understanding to what extent they understand (im)politeness and how they perceive its different nuances in interaction, without having received any formal instruction on the topic. By using excerpts from the TV series Sherlock (2010-2017), whose main character is a trigger for face-threatening acts, respondents with different backgrounds, levels of language competence, and different inputs (audio-visual or just audio, both integrated by the transcription of the dialogues) were asked to recognise and rate impoliteness. The students involved, who had not been taught (im)politeness explicitly, were proposed different situations, which they were asked to rate in terms of impoliteness, using Lickert scales. They were also asked to describe the characters involved in every interaction through adjectives.