The Acquisition of Politeness Patterns by Exchange Students in Japan 1

Helen Marriott

Introduction

Growing numbers of secondary and tertiary level students of foreign lan­guages have an opportunity to participate in an in-country program. These students have the chance to acquire many aspects of communicative compe­tence which are more difficult to acquire in the home country environment where learning is restricted, either wholly or predominantly, to language learning in the classroom. Many students who go abroad actually participate in focused instruction in class as well as being immersed in the natural environment and they are thus able to utilize a variety of factors beneficial to language learning. As reported in other papers in this volume, the value of in­country experience to foreign language learners who are at either the second­ary or tertiary level is generally not debated. However, questions remain as to the role of different contextual factors or components in their participatory experience with respect to language acquisition in general and certain aspects of communicative competence in particular. The focus of this study is to explore the extent to which Australian secondary students who participate in exchange programs in Japan acquire one aspect of sociolinguistic compe­tence: norms of politeness. Specifically, this chapter will address three re­search questions: (1) Which aspects of politeness in Japanese do exchange students acquire? (2) To what extent does previous study of Japanese lead to better management of politeness; and, (3) Which factors contribute to the students' acquisition of politeness? The first question thus addresses the gains which are made by learners through participation in an exchange program, while the last two questions seek to explain this outcome.

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Helen Marricu'

The model of conununicative competence employed in this paper J based on Hymes (1972a,b) and Neustupny (1973, 1978b, 1987), and~ defined as consisting of linguistic and sociolinguistic components. The socio­linguistic components cover rules relating to situations, variation, switch--OJJ, participants, content, message form, channel and management. Contentrules include, among other things, politeness, while variation rules cover the selec­tion of politeness styles as well as other linguistic choices. This framework of communicative competence is thus a very broad one and includes features which other researchers have categorized under discourse competence and strategic competence (cf. Canale and Swain 1980; Canale 1983). Communi­cation (or compensatory) strategies, which are often treated under strategk competence, are subsumed under management in the model I have adopted (cf. Faerch and Kasper 1983). Pragmatic competence is another category which is increasingly being used but which is included here under sociolin­guistic competence (cf. Bachman 1990).

In relation to Japanese language, variation in politeness styles relates to the use of honorifics, but it must be remembered that honorifics is hut one aspect, albeit a crucial one, of politeness in Japanese. Following Nenstu.pny (1968, 1978a, b), politeness can be defined as a system composed of(l)ll!I honorific system which consists of the grammatical encoding of verbal and other lexical elements, (2) respect speech or polite language, commollly referred to as (linguistic) politeness (cf. Brown and Levinson 1978), and()} etiquette or courtesy which covers non-verbal communicative behaviar. While politeness phenomena are an explicit manifestation of sociolin:gllislic behavior, politeness also performs an all-embracing function in that many sociolinguistic as well as linguistic components encode politeness.

A few of the studies undertaken so far on study abroad or exchange students have investigated components of communicative competence, as defined in this paper. DeKeyser (1986, 1991), for example, studied the monitoring and communication strategies employed by a group of American. learners in Spain. Language contact and use have also been studied in more general terms by Day (1985) and Kaplan (1989). In this regard, a more detailed study was made by Freed (1990) who examined the relatioasbip between students' out-of-class interactive and non interactive networks on their grammatical achievement and oral proficiency. Incorporating a cOirM· sational analysis approach, research by Siegal (this volume) on admmceti American learners in Japan represents another contribution to our W!lder· standing of learners' acquisition of communicative competence.

rhe Acquisition of Politeness Patterns 199

Among the existing studies of secondary exchange students overseas, a ;mall number has investigated Australian students in Japan, such as Okazaki­~uff' s (1992) work on the cultural adjustments experienced by such students. \1otivated by an interest in the communicative (sociolinguistic and linguistic) ~ains students make through an exchange experience, Marriott (1993) has )Utlined a framework for studying the acquisition of sociolinguistic compe­:ence, and has reported on some data collected from a group of 11 Australian ;tudents who were in Japan in 1992. This work is supplemented by Hashimoto's (1993) natural recordings of discourse of on~ Australian ex­:;hange student where she examined how self- and other-correction proceeds in interactive situations in a Japanese homestay context.

Secondary students on year-long or other exchange programs represent a very important group, given the different nature of the programs in which they participate (cf. Lussier et al. 1993; Marriott 1993; Lapkin et al. this volume). (Other research on secondary level students on exchange programs is listed in Marriott l 994a, 1994b) Australian secondary students on exchange in Japan invariably stay with a host family (or families) and attend a regular high school. They may or may nor receive a small amount of individualized tuition in the target language which is provided by the school, but primarily they participate in the general school life along side other native speakers of Japanese. This type of experience can be described as "submersion" in the natural environment, and differs substantially from many of the programs for tertiary students in Japan where focused instruction for foreign learners is frequently the main component of their overseas sojourn and for which the tenn "immersion" is now sometimes applied (cf. Huebner this volume). The usual dichotomy of focused classroom instruction and out-of-class contact thus seems inappropriate when describing the experience of this type of exchange student at the secondary level.

Methodology

Subjects

This chapter reports on part of an on-going project on the acquisition of Japanese by Australian secondary exchange students, introducing the 1993 cohort of eight students who spent that year in Japan. The students will be referred to as El2 to E19. They visited Japan under programs organized by

200 Helen Marriott

Rotary International, the state-based Australia-Japan Society of _Victoria ~r their schools. Their ages ranged from 15 to 18 years of age at the tJ.me of their departure from Australia. .

Six students had previously studied Japanese at the secondary level pnor to their visit to Japan: four students had completed the final levels of Years 11 (El4 and E18) or 12 Japanese (El3 and E17) after completion of five to five and a half years of language study, while two students, who had studied Japanese for three to three and a half years, had completed Year 10 (E12 and El6). All could be classed as possessing low level proficiency in Japanese, which is not surprising given the hours of instruction and the nature of the curriculum at the secondary level. Strictly speaking, El 7 was not an exchange student as she missed out on selection after finishing Year 12 and instead found a position as an assistant English teacher at a Japanese school. The two students who had not studied Japanese at school both participated in a Rotary International exchange program which does not require any previous study of the language as a prerequisite for selection. Once selected, however, one (E15) enrolled in a short community course (one hour a week for four months). The other student's (El9) knowledge of Japanese was restricted to introductory and other routine formulae acquired during a pre-exchange preparatory seminar offered by the exchange organization. Both are treated as beginners in this study.

Data collection

The study employed a variety of data collection methods. The principal test instrument was a Japanese oral proficiency interview, especially designed for the project in 1992 and revised in 1993. All six students who had studied Japanese at the secondary level participated in the pre-exchange oral inter­view just before they left on the exchange in December 1992. This took the form of an interview of an average of 20 minutes in length about their study of Japanese, school and family, imminent trip and their future plans. The stu­dents were also given the opportunity to ask questions of the interviewer about Japan. Each interview was video-recorded. In addition, these students, together with EIS, completed a Learning Strategies Inventory, adapted from Oxford 09_90), for ~e purpose of raising their awareness about how to go a~ut lea:ru~g a foreign language. They were also invited to complete a daily diary whi~e m Japan on their language learning experiences. All submitted some entnes though the nature and quantity of their notes varied enormously.

The Acquisition of Politeness Patterns 201

The post-exchange oral interview, which was also video tape-recorded, was conducted with all students as soon as they returned to Australia in early 1994. The average length of this interview was 40 minutes. At this stage, one of the students, who was a beginner in Japanese (El9) upon arrival in Japan, was added to the sample. The interview included an extended discourse section on their experiences in Japan, a task describing a picture and a role play. The students then took part in a short introspective follow-up interview in English where the picture description segment of the video-recorded interview was replayed to them. All students completed a short written task in Japanese and were also interviewed in English on their experiences in Japan. These interviews were recorded on audio tape. Two native speaker university lecturers undertook the pre-exchange oral interviews, a third one acted as interviewer for the post-exchange oral interviews, and I interviewed the students in English. Transcripts were made of all the recordings, and one or two native speakers undertook the judgments concerning the acceptability of the politeness patterns which had been selected for examination.

The Japan experience

The exchange students had maximum opportunity for exposure to Japanese language, principally through their participation in the target environment where they were expected to be involved in regular home and school life, and to a more limited extent, in community activities, usually those organized by their exchange organization. Although the majority of learners benefited from some formal tuition in Japanese language at school and all reportedly undertook some conscious self-study of the language, natural acquisition seems to have definitely accounted for most of their learning. Cooperative interactants who surrounded the learners, such as host family members, teachers, friends and even members of their exchange arganization, probably contributed signifi­cantly to the quality of this enviroriment. As a result of a myriad of factors, all the Australian exchange students made remarkable progress during their sojourn in Japan, including the two students who were beginners in Japanese.

Politeness phenomena

As mentioned above, the sociolinguistic feature covered in the analysis of the students' discourse to follow is politeness. The present discussion focuses on

202 Helen Marriott

a limited number of features of the far larger area of Japanese linguistic and sociolinguistic features of politeness. Here, politeness is operationalized to cover the selection and use of the appropriate honorific style and honorific forms, the making of requests, the use of polite routines, and the use of appropriate address forms. As far as possible, changes in the students' pre­and post-exchange behavior are compared and contrasted. Certain compari­sons are also made with the prior study which focused on another cohort of students, as mentioned above (cf. Marriott 1993). Seigal's detailed analysis in this volume is also concerned with politeness phenomena. Unlike the younger and less advanced learners in this study, her study outlines the acquisition achieved by advanced learners in relation to honorific styles and other fea­tures in a formal speech event and in a conversational interaction with a superior, and she provides explanations for some of the processes of acquisi­tion and the problems which occur.

Honorific style

According to Neustupny' s (1987) classification, variation rules define types of features occurring in situations and the selection of appropriate features or varieties. Variation rules cover the use of Standard and Common Japanese, politeness styles, formality, written and spoken language, and code switching in intercultural contact situations. Amongst other features, politeness styles involve addressee and referent honorifics which function to communicate distance among personnel in discourse. For addressee honorifics, the three basic honorific styles in Japanese are the plain style, sometimes described as the informal style (or the da-style), the polite style, also known as the formal style (or the desu!masu-style), and the very formal form, sometimes referred to as the deferential (or gozaimasu) style (Neustupny 1978a, 1986). The plain style is the most neutral style and is used within families and among good friends (Neustupny 1986:64). It is also used in some non-final syntactic environments, and often, but not invariably, sentence final particles which carry semantic content are used after final predicates which are in the plain style. The polite style is normally used in out-group situations, for example, among adults who are not particularly good friends, and from students to teachers, reflecting its use towards superiors. In the case of students who communicate with a university lecturer, the Japanese norm thus requires that the former use the polite honorific style and this expectation was held by all

The Acquisition of Politeness Patterns 203

interviewers in this study. Lecturers frequently also employ this style when interacting with students, though their social status and age allows them to employ the plain style.

Apart from the selection of a basic style for the situation, switching between styles also occurs for a number of purposes. For example, a switch from the polite to the plain style may occur when speakers wish to communi­cate empathy, when they abruptly remember something, or when they present background information which is semantically subordinate within the dis­course structure (Ikuta 1983:37; Maynard 1992:27). Conversely, the mixing of the polite forms within discourse which is basically of the plain style can be employed for a variety of purposes, including the expression of emphasis, for assertion and strong negation or sarcasm, in requests for assistance and when speakers play the role of an expert (Niyekawa 1978). Switches from the plain to the polite sty le can also perform a hypersyntactic function to mark a return to a previous sub-topic (Ikuta 1983; Neustupny 1986). Another important feature of Japanese related to politeness style is the tendency for predicates to be sometimes omitted. Such omission serves to soften the politeness level since this is communicated most overtly through the predicate, especially the final predicate (Mizutani and Mizutani 1987).

In relation to the exchange students' ability to manage variation rules, an analysis was undertaken of the selection of the basic style used by them in the pre- and post-exchange interviews. As discussed above, we sought to mea­sure the students' ability to optionally switch to the plain style, as appropriate, so included in the post-exchange interview a role play component where the interlocutor was to be their Japanese host mother. As in the conversational interaction with the interviewer, it was assumed that the students should use the polite style for the picture description, which was also contained in the post-exchange interview. The use of the honorific style was counted sepa­rately for the three different discourse types (although these details are not reported here). An examination was also made of their omission of predicates.

The analysis presented in Tables 1 and 2 show the students' use of the plain and polite forms as well as their omission of predicates in the pre- and post-exchange interviews. Instances. of deviant usage have also been calcu­

lated. Prior to going on an exchange, all students employed the polite honorific

style, principally according to the Japanese norm, while use of the plain form was minimal, and all instances which did occur were deviant (Table 1). (As

204 Helen Marriott

Table J. Use of polite and plain styles in the pre-exchange interview

Students Polite form Plain form Predicate Omission

Approp. Dev. Approp. Dev. Approp. Dev.

E12 61 0 0 15 0 52

47.7% 0% 0% 11.7% 0% 40.6%

E13 46 3 0 3 7 43

45.1% 2.9% 0% 2.9% 6.9% 42.2%

E14 32 3 0 20 2 75

24.2% 2.3% 0% 15.2% 1.5% 56.8%

E16 35 1 0 4 0 17 61.4% 1.8% 0% 7.0% 0% 29.8%

E17 44 3 0 8 12 32 44.5% 3% 0% 8.1% 12.1% 32.3%

E18 38 3 0 3 1 22 56.7% 4.5% 0% 4.5% 1.5% 32.8%

Table 2. Use of polite and plain styles in the post-exchange interview

Students Polite form Plain form Predicate Omission

Approp. Dev. Approp. Dev. Approp. Dev.

El2 68 4 17 59 5 40 35.2% 2.1% 8.8% 30.6% 2.6% 20.7%

~ E13 22 0 17 274 1 204

4.2% 0% 3.3% 52.9% 0.2% 39.4% E14 105 0 76 163 30 51

24.7% 0% 17.9% 38.3% 7.1% 12.0% E15 41 2 9 90 23 39

20.1% 1.0% 4.4% 44.1% 11.3% 19.1% El6 242 5 52 107 25 65

48.8% 1.0% 10.5% 21.6% 5.0% 13.1 % El7 M 8 12 148 18 65

20.6% 2.5% 3.8% 46.8% 5.7% 20.6% E18 97 3 16 79 10 5

46.2% 1.4% 7.6% 37.6% 4.8% 2.4% El9 107 2 6 39 0 29

58.5% 1.1% 3.3% 21.3% 0% 15.8%

The Acquisition of Politeness Patterns 205

noted above, E15 and El 9 were beginners of Japanese upon arrival in Japan and had thus not taken any pre-test before departure.) The learners copiously omitted predicates inappropriately, indicating the fragmentary nature of their discourse. For instance, sometimes the learner would commence an utterance and then abandon it, finish an utterance inappropriately mid-way, or merely utter single lexicon. After the exchange period, all students increased their use of the plain style, and although some instances of usage were acceptable, much constituted deviations from the norm (Table 2). On the other hand, inappropriate omission of predicates declined after the exchange, perhaps partly because they did not experience the same difficulty in producing more coherent segments of speech. However, casualness and informality of their discourse is strongly marked due to an increase in their use of the plain style, especially in positions where they give short responses to the interviewer. Table 3 summarizes the pre- and post-exchange differences in the mean scores.

The classification of predicates into the three categories of polite and plain honorific style and omission of predicates demonstrates general tenden­cies, but really needs to be interpreted in the context of other communicative features which also contribute to the overall honorific style employed but which are not discussed here. If we total together the use of the polite and plain styles (including instances of appropriate usage and deviations), we find that upon their return, the plain form becomes the. dominant style for four

Table 3. Pre- and post-exchange use of honorific style

Honorific style

Polite honorific style Appropriate use Deviation

Plain honorific style Appropriate use Deviation

Predicate omission Appropriate use Deviation

Pre-exchange n=6

mean

46.6 2.9

0 8.2

5.5 39

Post-exchange n=8

mean

36.3 1.5

8.0 34.3

6.0 14.8

206 Helen Marriott

learners (E13, El4, El5 and E17) and that another student (E12), who mixes stvles, uses slightly more plain than polite forms. On the other hand, only two stiidents (El9 and El6) use the polite style as the dominant style, while a further student (El8) uses a mixture, with slightly more polite than plain forms.

In the interview following the exchange, some differences in the usage of the boo-0rific style did emerge according to the discourse type - interactional conversation, picture description or role-play, but not necessarily in the way predicted. As mentioned above, the situation established for the role play allowed the learner to employ the plain style2. Contrary to the Japanese norm, all students actually employed plain forms - in varying amounts - in the conversational interaction with the interviewer, but for both the picture de­scription and the role play, some of them switched to using a greater propor­tion of polite forms, even if some plain forms still remained. This switching could be attributed to a raising of their awareness towards language form, where the polite style was used in their more careful speech, even if mixing occurred. At this stage of the analysis, it appears that throughout the full interview, the students' mixing of plain and polite forms is largely haphazard, indicating that they had not acquired the ability to switch according to native norms.

A comparison of the rank order of students' correct usage of the polite form, given in Table 4, reveals that there is a high degree of correlation between their pre- and post-exchange performances. The notable exception is EB who, upon return, predominantly uses the plain style. The position of the two beginners of Japanese (E15 and El 9) is of interest. In the production of the polite honorific style, one of the students (E19) who had not undertaken any study of Japanese at the secondary level exceeded all other students -contrary to expectation, while the second student without prior secondary training (El5) performed weakly. After E19, the rank order of the first three best learners remains the same for the pre-and post-exchange interviews, but the order changes slightly for those in the bottom half of the ranking, where E14 has a higher position than El 7 and El3 falls to the lowest position.

While this analysis shows that El9, who had not previously studied Japanese, was the most competent user of the polite style of speaking in terms of selecting the appropriate addressee honorific forms more than other stu­dents, she was also the learner who spoke the least, as indicated, for instance, by the total number of predicates she employed (183 compared with the mean of 290). Her rate of speech appeared to be slower in comparison with the

The Acquisition of Politeness Patterns

Table 4. Rank order of correct polite form usage

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Pre-exchange n::;:6

E16 (61.4) E18 (56.7) E12 (47.7) E13 (45.1) El7 (44.5) El4 (24.2)

Post-exchange n::;:8

E19 (58.5) El6 (48.8) E18 (46.2) El2 (35.2) E!4 (24.7) E17 (20.6) EIS (20.1) El3 (4.2)

207

other students, and she was far less cooperative in topic development. Since idiosyncratic differences may account for some of the findings and are consistent with a high degree of individual variation found in other studies (DeKeyser 1991; Huebner this volume), it is not possible to make generaliza­tions from a small case study such as this.

An examination of the discourse data showed that no student employed any referent honorific forms. This finding accords with the results of the study of the 1992 cohort of 11 exchange students where only one learner, who had attained an exceptionally high level of overall competence by the end of his year in Japan, employed several referent honorific forms (cf. Marriott 1993).

In conclusion, then, with regard to the important sociolinguistic rule pertaining to use of addressee honorifics, all the students committed a serious deviation by using too many predicates in the plain style, though their perfor­mance differed quite significantly in the proportion of plain predicates em­ployed. It was originally expected that those without any previous study of Japanese would predominantly employ the plain style in the post-exchange interview while those with previous background would use the polite style. The original assumptions have not proven to be correct, with all of those with previous study of Japanese using varying amount3 of the plain style and with only one of the two beginners predominantly employing the plain style.

Requesting behavior

Following Neustupny (1987), switch-on rules define under what condi­tions communication in situations takes place, in other words, what functions

208 Helen Marriott

are performed. These functions include informative functions which embrace giving advice or descriptions, appeal functions sue? as_ maki~g. requests or issuing invitations, expressive functions like expressmg hkes/d1shkes or mak­ing complaints, and cooperative functions which include tum-taking and topic development. The picture description talk and the role-play enabled us to study the informative functions fulfilled by explanations and descriptions, as well as the appeal function of requests. Towards the end of the post­exchange interview students were shown a sheet which described a role-play situation, requiring them to ask permission from their Japanese homestay mother for a visiting Australian friend to stay with them for a weekend.

The analysis draws upon the framework used in the large Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989), with modifications made in accordance with patterns which emerged from the data and which were deemed appropriate for the Japanese language (cf. Mizutani and Mizutani 1987). The goal was to identify the range of components or requesting strategies which the learners employed in the request sequence. A scoring system was devised to allow a maximum of two points for the use of an appropriate pattern, or one point where that pattern included a deviation (or deviations) of a grammatical nature. Although this system did not take into consideration differences in the size nor complexity of components in the request sequence, it did make allowance for accuracy as well as range of patterns. The two native speaker raters who undertook the scoring of this segment adopted a lenient approach, allowing the plain or polite style or, as was commonly the case, a mixture of styles, even though they clearly made the global assessment that much of the conspicuous mixing constituted devi­ant verbal behavior.

Table 5 pi'esents a summary of the analysis on requests, showing the le~' performance with regard to the following components: alerters, supportive moves, head act, responses to requests/questions, sub-topic devel­opment and dosing formulae. All the students produced the essential dis­course elements of an opening, supportive moves, the main request and a

The scoring system produced a mean score of 12.5%. However, considera~le variation existed between students, with the higher overall scores bemg m~stiy obtained by those with previous study of Japanese as agamst those without. As exceptions, however, E13 scored a low mark and E!4 also fell into the bottom group. Nevertheless, the data show that students vaned not only in the amount of components or strategies produced but in the

The Acquisition of Politeness Patterns 209

Table 5. Components of the request sequence

Request frames E12 E13 E14 E15 E16 E17 E18 E19

Alerters 4 2 5 2 3 4 2 2 Supportive moves 2 3 3 2 2 3 5 3 (pre-head act)

Head act 2 2 1 I 9 2 Supportive moves 5 2 2 4 I I (post-head act)

Reply to mother's 4 3 2 2 6 7 11 4 requests/questions (x no. of occurrences)

Optional sub-topic I 3 3 I introduction (x no. of topics)

Closing formulae 4 2 2 2 4 2 2 2

Total score 23 12 16 9 21 21 32 13 15.6% 8.2% 10.9% 6.1% 14.3% 14.3% 21.8% 8.8%

No. of correct frames/ 10/3 4/4 614 3/3 619 8/5 13/6 5/3 frames with a deviation

% of correct frames 77% 50% 60% 50% 40% 61.5% 68% 62.5%

proportion of those used according to the Japanese norm. The proportion of accurate components was below 50% in the case of three students (E16, El3 and E15). Notably, their backgrounds in Japanese all differed.

An examination of the request sequence shows that all the learners were particularly successful in opening and closing the request. They made full use of alerters where they employed an appropriate address term or an attention getter in the opening positions. When closing the request, they used a wide variety of routine formulae, including formulae of gratitude, an expression of pleasure, a pledge of action or a specific formula which closes a request. These findings thus indicate that the learners had successfully acquired polite formulaic utterances. Likewise, the exchange students skillfully handled their responses to questions or requests made by the host mother during the sequence.

The students supplied supportive moves which provided reasons or justifications for their request, following the specifications given in the role­play instructions. In the head act itself, the learners mostly sought direct

210 Helen Marriott

agreement or else used suggestory, agreement or approval formulae. More than one-half of the students also gave a variety of additional supportive moves following the head act, involving such content as mitigation of the imposition, a want statement, the provision of options, or reference to condi­tions. These extra supportive moves were not provided by the two beginners in Japanese (E15 or E19), or by E17, though the latter compensated by introducing optional sub-topics.

Despite the students' ability to supply the essential head act and support­ive moves, a conspicuous feature is the existence of grammatical deviations which involved syntactic, morphological, lexical or semantic features. On the other hand, the analysis suggests that the learners were able to use a range of formulaic expressions and to also make a request, as instructed, even if some segments of it were characterized by grammatical deviations.

A number of issues deserve mention here. Firstly, all students managed to transmit the basic propositional content, as shown by their ability to use supportive moves in addition to the head act. Secondly, the learners were able to employ a wide range of components or requesting strategies for use in a request sequence. Thirdly, formulaic patterns and responses to requests or questions were executed well. Fourthly, there was considerable variation in the number of components produced by the students, despite the fact that they were given the same instructions. Two students initiated sub-topics which prolonged the role-play, and some attracted more questions or requests from the interviewer than others. In relation to length of previous study, two of the three learners who produced the least number of frames were beginners in Japanese and the other, a post-Year 12 student. Fifthly, all students committed numerous linguistic deviations, despite their ability to maintain communica­tion. These deviations rarely occurred in the opening or closing positions or in the short response moves, but centered upon the head act or supportive moves, or even in the self-initiated sub-topic development. The three students with the -lowest proportions of correctly produced frames varied in their backgrounds, as previously stated. Sixthly, as noted above, the request se­quences were marked by stylistic deviations, where the students mixed the plain and polite forms. In most cases, the mixing appeared to be haphazard. For instance, sometimes they self-corrected a plain form response to the polite fo1m or vice versa, even when such correction was not required.

In summary, all the exchange students managed to adequately transmit the request and in so doing, employed a range of polite patterns, even if

The Acquisition of Politeness Patterns 211

grammatical deviations occurred. Nevertheless, this sequence is the only one of the four features examined in this study where the two beginners in Japanese - along with one post-Year 12 student - achieved lower scores. but this result has been explained as being due to their tendency to provide less elaboration, thereby producing less talk overall. In terms of accuracy, one of the two beginners (El 9) performed better than the other (E15). While there does not appear to be conspicuous variation in the expression of politeness as such between these two beginning students and the students who had previ­ously studied Japanese, other differences relating to their performance do

seem to be present.

Openings and closings

Message form rules decide in what order or form content will be presented in messages. In this regard, a comparison was made of the students' use of formulaic routines in the opening and closing sequences of the interviews, and an examination was also undertaken of their ability to produce a self­introduction, which constitutes a regularly occurring sequence in Japanese. Already the learners' skillful use of opening and closing routines in the role play segment has been noted. Table 6 summarizes the findings concerning the students' management of formulaic routines, showing appropriate use, or, on the other hand, omission or some other type of deviation in the opening and

closings of the pre- and post-exchange interviews. In the pre-exchange interview. the six students managed to produce a

self-introduction, but in nearly all cases this was spread out over many short turns and required a series of questions from the interviewer to develop the sequence. Only E16 took the initiative in providing a lengthy self-introduc­tion with minimal input from the interviewer. Furthermore, the same student provided the single appropriate closing to the sequence (doozo yoroshi.ku

Table 6. Students' management of polite formulaic routines

Opening sequence Closing sequence

Pre-exchange (n=6) Post-exchange (n=8)

Use Omission/deviation Use Omission/deviation

1 1

5 5

6 6

2(?) 2

212 Helen Marriott

"I'm pleased to meet you"). In contrast, the self-introductions of the other five students lacked this formulaic politeness pattern.

The format of the post-exchange interview differed slightly from the first interview, with the interviewer generally introducing her own name and expressing a formulaic greeting. Six students produced a natural, spontaneous polite routine (usually yoroshiku onegai shimasu .. how do you do"/"thank you for interviewing me"), sometimes by appropriately repeating the expres­sion used by the interviewer, or by adding a polite verbal ending (shimasu) where this was omitted by the interviewer in accordance with the Japanese nonn. (The greeting was inadvertently skipped by the interviewer in one case and the recording was indecipherable in another.) The data thus show that the students managed the opening greeting routines skillfully, demonstrating their ability to produce the second part of an adjacency pair.

As with their production of polite routines in the opening sequences, the learners demonstrated a great improvement in their handling of polite expres­sions of appreciation in the closing segment of the interview after their return from Japan. Before their exchange, five of the six students surprisingly used the form arigatoo ("thanks") without the obligatory polite marker (gozaima.su), even where two of these instances constituted the second part of an adjacency pair. In other words, the learners were not able to repeat the polite routine expressed by the interviewer in the immediately preceding turn and they dropped the polite ending (gozaimasu). On the contrary, in the post-exchange interview, six students produced the full, polite expression of gratitude, and these occurrences included two cases where the interviewer produced the first part of the pair informally (without gozaimasu). In the remaining two cases, neither El2 nor El 7 produced any routine in the adjacent position, even though the interviewer had produced an expression of gratitude. Perhaps their conduct in this context was an artifact of the method, with the students not understanding the procedure to follow, as it had been explained to them prior to the interview that a follow-up interview would also be undertaken.

In conclusion, the data positively show that at the end of their stay in Japan, the students had successfully acquired polite routinized expressions for use in both the opening and closing sequences of the interviews. Their performance was characterized by the production of rapidly spoken utter­ance~, ease of delivery and the selection of an appropriate level of politeness. The importance of the acquisition of formulaic utterances has already been ,~ted by others, including Schmidt (1983:150), who argued that the acquisi-

The Acquisition of Politeness Patterns 213

tion of a rich repertoire of formulaic utterances or memorized sentences and phrases increases the appearance of fluency.

Personal reference forms

Use of forms of address represents one of many content rules which specify what content will be included in messages, and it constitutes a central compo­nent in the communication of politeness. The analysis to follow is one exemplification of content rules relating to the students' management of third person reference forms for family members. The Japanese honorific system is expressed through personal reference forms in various ways, and deviations from the norm are likely to be noted and evaluated negatively, even if these evaluations range in severity from weak through to strong evaluations.

Although the content of the pre- and post-exchange interviews was not strictly comparable, some general tendencies may be observed from the data. Whereas in the first interview the learners talked more about their Australian families, upon return from Japan they spoke in depth about their Japanese host families, so consequently the number of occurrences of third person reference forms increased dramatically. The range of forms employed by all students jumped from a total of 19 personal reference forms for family members to 47 different forms or variants (including some deviant instances) upon their return. Notably, the proportion of deviations committed by all students decreased after their sojourn in Japan. Table 7 shows the number of

Table 7. Management of third person reference forms for family referents

Students Pre-exchange (n=6) Post-exchange (n=8)

Deviations/ % of Deviations/ % of no. of occur. appropriate forms no. of occur. appropriate forms

El2 5113 61.5% 1/23 95.6% E13 4/8 50% 14/42 66.7% E14 0/8 100% 4/54 92.6% E15 NA 2/31 93.5% E16 1/8 87.5% 2no 97.1% E17 3/9 66.7% 16/61 73.8% E18 5/10 50% 0150 100% E19 NA 2/51 96%

214 Helen Marriott

occurrences, including deviations, of third person reference forms for family referents in the pre-and post-exchange interviews.

Four of the six students experienced problems with this feature of the language prior to their sojourn abroad (Table 7). Of these, two learners (E12 and E18) displayed a dramatic improvement after their year in Japan. How­ever, the two students (E13 and El 7) who were weakest before departure continued to display the largest number of deviations. Interestingly, the two beginners in Japanese, E15 and El9, both performed exceedingly well.

An examination of the nature of the learners' deviations showed that there was a continuation of the early problems in the post-exchange inter­views, in addition to the occurrence of several new types of problems. While nearly all these problems pertained to the expression of politeness, especially through the use of honorific forms, some difficulty with lexicon was also apparent. This data is presented in Table 8.

Lexical problems existed at both stages overall, and accounted for three of the four instances in the second interview for the two beginners of J apa­nese. These two beginners, in contrast to some of the other students, had thus successfully learned how to encode politeness through third person reference forms for family members, even if they experienced occasional problems of a different type. Among the lexical deviations there was a new sub-category in the post-exchange interview, illustrated by two students (E12 and E19) who, on one occasion each, inappropriately code-switched to English, though they employed Japanese phonological rules.

Table 8. Nature of deviations in use of third person reference for family referents

Nature of deviation

Lexical Use of honorific fonn for in-group Use of neutral form for out-group Incorrect reference form category Too casual a variant Other

Total

*includes one case with multiple deviations

Pre-exchange No. of occurrences

6 6 5 3

20*

Post-exchange No. of occurrences

7 6 19 2 5 2

41

The Acquisition of Politeness Patterns 215

Use of honorific forms for one's in-group, in this case their own Austra­lian family (for example, use of the title san lit. "Mr." attached to one's younger brother's given name), was a main problem initially, and fell propor­tionally since the focus of the conversational content was not on their Austra­lian families in the post-exchange interview. While this type of deviation may attract only a weak evaluation from a Japanese interactant, it is likely to convey a sense of immaturity on the part of the speaker or else convey an impression of foreignness. Conversely, in the post-exchange interview, prob­lems increased in relation to use of neutral forms for out-group referents, specifically, for their Japanese family members. Though such problems were observed before their visit to Japan, these increased proportionally, given the changed focus of the conversation. This type of deviation, which commonly involved the omission of the title (san "Mr.", "Ms", "Ms") after a surname (for example, in reference to their host families), is likely to be evaluated much more severely and, in fact, the interviewer often post-corrected the learners' deviations in her subsequent turns. Together, El3 and El7 were responsible for 18 of the 19 deviations in this category. The existence of these last two types of problems thus indicates that not all learners were able to select the appropriate neutral or honorific terms for use in the interview with an out-group addressee, the interviewer. These two students, in particular, were relatively unsuccessful in selecting appropriate reference forms accord­ing to the solidarity category of their addressee.

The use of a different category of personal reference form, for example, ~ a given name for one's younger siblings instead of a kinship term (the · common pattern in Japanese), constitutes a fourth type of deviation, both , before and after their in-country sojourn. Nevertheless, new types of devia­tions also arose after the exchange period. Most Japanese kinship terms possess a range of honorific variants differing in degree of formality or casualness, and some of the students (E13, E14 and E17) in a small number of instances selected overly casual variants, which were inappropriate in the given context of an interview with an out-group addressee. Finally, more complex language problems also occasionally arose after their return in relation to the use of deictic forms (ano hito instead of sono hito, "that person") (El5), as well as use of sore (''that") (El3), which cannot be used as

a personal reference form. In all, the students employed a diverse range of third person reference

forms for family referents, with the discourse of only two students - who had

216 Helen Marriott

actually completed the final secondary school year in Japanese - being characterized by a number of deviations in politeness in the post-exchange interview. In contrast, the two beginners in Japanese had successfully mas­tered the politeness rules which determine the use of appropriate personal reference fonns.

Concluding discus.9on

In order to interact, foreign language learners need to acquire linguistic, sociolinguistic and sociocultural competence. This chapter has focused upon students' acquisition of one aspect of sociolinguistic competence, namely politeness. Before advancing to a general discussion and interpretation of the findings, let us return to the three major research questions posed at the beginning. Firstly, which aspects of politeness in Japanese do exchange students acquire? Of the four major variables examined in the preceding analysis, the learners became very competent in handling polite formulaic expressions after their year's sojourn. This was evidenced not only in their native-like management of appropriate formulae in the opening and closing sequences of the interview, but also in the opening and closing segments of the role play. Although the competence to produce such routine formulae may appear to be very elementary, it must be remembered that the learners were not capable of this before their exchange experience. All of the students also skillfully acted out the role play where they performed a request, even if grammatical deviations were present. Nevertheless, it was noted that the two of the three students who used less elaboration in comparison with the other students were beginners in Japanese. However, slightly different results were found for the accuracy of frames, with the three students who possessed the lowest proportion all having different backgrounds in Japanese. Three-quar­ters of the learners used a diverse repertoire of third person reference terms for family members, with a minimal number of deviations, except in the case of two students whose discourse was characterized by some problems in the expression of politeness. No use of referent honorifics was found in the data but in the given context, the lack of this feature did not constitute inappropri~ ate behavior.

The learners were least successful with regard to the selection and use of r an appropriate honorific style in their interviews with the university lecturer.

The Acquisition of Politeness Patterns 217

This was seen most conspicuously in their greatly increased use of the plain style, and occasionally in the choice of casual third person reference forms by several students. Without doubt, the over-use of the plain style represented a significant type of deviation in the interview situation. The data clearly show that most students possessed both styles, yet they were unable to switch appropriately, as their discourse characteristically carried a mixture of both plain and polite styles which did not accord with the Japanese norm. The selection of the plain style constitutes a deviation in itself, and although this matter was not discussed in detail, the learners frequently employed a pidginized version of it, omitting the necessary final particles which often accompany plain style predicates.

Related to this problem of lack of acquisition of addressee honorifics is the issue of the seriousness of deviations. Some reference was made in the previous section on personal reference forms to weak and serious deviations. Neustupny has claimed that we "need to establish scales of different degrees of inadequacy for different deviations from Japanese norms" (Neustupny 1990:4). Since the prime aim for learners is to interact in intercultural contact situations, one of the most important issues we need to better understand is how their behavior is evaluated by the native speakers with whom they interact. In the case of foreign speakers of Japanese, the inability to employ addressee honorifics seems to be one aspect which commonly attracts a very strong evaluation of inadequacy and hence ranks highly in terms of serious­ness (Neustupny 1987:80). It should be added here that the adult raters who assessed use of the plain style as being inappropriate for the context of the interviews in this study may possibly (but probably not) be overgeneralizing a norm which is pertinent for adult behavior. That is to say, use of this informal style could possibly be more permissible for younger students, especially for those who are still of high school age. Natural recordings of the discourse of young Japanese native speakers towards seniors, including their own school teachers, are needed in order to corroborate some of the claims made in this paper. Similarly, an examination of the evaluative attitudes of the Japanese with whom the exchange students interact in Japan is also necessary.

A number of reasons can be proposed to account for the students' lack of mastery of addressee honorifics in particular, as well as for other deviations from politeness norms in general. Firstly, most of the input around them in the home and school domain would be in the plain style. Interestingly, during the English interviews as well as in their diaries, some of the students commented

218 Helen Marriott

or noted that they were only able to employ the polite style on arrival, whereas the basic style spoken around them was the plain style.

Secondly, interference from English which lacks such explicit stylistic variation rules is one cause of the students' lack of mastery of addressee honorifics. Furthermore, the complexity of the honorific system in Japanese constitutes a special difficulty for foreign learners, not only in terms of the range of expressions available, but also with regard to the underlying input features which determine selection and use. A third, but related reason concerns the non-reciprocal nature of stylistic variation. The students' senior interlocutors in Japan would use the plain style towards them but according to the norm, students could be expected to employ the polite style. The inter­viewer herself frequently switched between styles during the interview and this may have triggered the Australian learners' attempts to use an equivalent

style. A fourth and extremely important reason relates to the lack of feedback

available to the students. It appears that little attention was paid to this matter during the limited tuition in Japanese language provided to them. Also, the textbooks used by students in these lessons as well as in private study followed the traditional approach of instruction for foreign learners by intro­ducing the polite style. In contrast, the plain style is the dominant style in the home, school and friendship domains in which the students participate, and it is, of course, the basic style acquired by Japanese children.

Apart from formal introduction through instruction, feedback on norm deviations can also be available to learners from their interlocutors. However, through the English interviews it was discovered that the students could rarely, if ever, remember having received negative feedback about their stylistic choice, and several learners revealed their belief that without specific correction they assumed that their language behavior was acceptable. In contrast, El6 reported that his club instructor did provide this negative feedback, directing his attention to the need to employ a polite style towards senior addressees. Just as native speakers rarely correct grammatical devia­tions, especially if the message is understood (Schmidt 1983:166), it seems that the exchange students' Japanese interlocutors do not engage in very much correction of honorific style. Additionally, those family members clos­est to the students and who are also the most likely to provide correction, are those to whom it is appropriate to use the plain style.

All of the available evidence seems to suggest that exchange students cannot acquire Japanese addressee honorifics unless they receive - and

The Acquisition of Politeness Patterns 219

utilize - corrective feedback, either from their interlocutors or as a part of some form of instruction. Coupled with this is the need for a lot of practice, in other words, output. These conditions do not appear to be available to them while in Japan and so their deviations persist. Consequently, in order to avoid the occurrence of later fossilization of this feature, it is important that correc­tive instruction be available to them in the subsequent courses which they undertake in Australia following their exchange period. The longitudinal case study undertaken by Hashimoto (1993) indicated that upon return to Austra­lia. the exchange student in her study, who had used virtually only the plain form in all the recordings undertaken in Japan, had, in fact, switched to the polite style, reportedly as a result of negative feedback from her teacher.

The second question posed in this chapter concerned the extent to which previous study of Japanese leads to better management of politeness. Since only eight students were covered in this case study, we are unable to make generalizations, but in the case of these students and in relation to the communication of politeness, whether their previous study had been for three or six years, or whether they had undertaken none at all does not seem to make much of a difference. An extreme result was obtained for their use of addressee honorifics, with the two beginners ranking either highest or very low in their use of the polite form in predicates. Their scores were among the lowest in the production of a request, but I have suggested this was due to their tendency to speak less than the other students. However, the two beginners produced formulaic routines very skillfully and their use of third person reference forms for family members was excellent.

Of the six students who had studied Japanese at secondary school, four had completed five or more years of study, with two (El3 and El?) having completed the final secondary school examination in the language. The measure of number of years of previous study is undoubtedly too crude, with a more adequate measure of proficiency being preferable. Furthermore, the sample is too small to reach the conclusl.on that secondary school study of Japanese is not of benefit to exchange students, and it may be the case that E 13 and El 7, who performed weakly on several variables, were low perform­ers in general. This claim is partly based upon the fact that in the sections on addressee honorifics and personal reference forms where performance vari­ables were more quantifiable, it was shown that E13 and El 7 were among the weaker performers before their sojourn in Japan and that the gap between them and the other students seemed to widen as a result of their year's sojourn

220 Helen Marriott

abroad. At the same time, the two learners who had studied Japanese for three to three and a half years up to the level of Year 10 (E12 and E16) both performed very well on most of the variables examined. Notably, however, the proportion of correct frames used by E16 in the request sequence was the lowest of all students. Although both El 5 and El 9 expressed the fact that they felt their motivation was higher than that of other students upon arrival in Japan - to compensate for their lack of previous study of Japanese - other explanations need to be sought. It seems that the findings here are consistent with those of other studies which show that learners with lower proficiency initially make the greater gains (cf. Freed 1990; Lapkin et al. this volume;

Ginsberg 1992). The third question posed in this chapter is the most difficult of them all:

Which factors contribute to the students' acquisition of politeness? The more general question of acquisition of Japanese in general is probably more applicable, even if it is equally difficult. Only a few suggestions can be briefly advanced here but these and others need to be taken up in future research. Previous study of Japanese is one possible contributing factor. However, as noted above, the acquisition by the eight students of the politeness features examined in this study did not seem to be strongly influenced by this variable. Previous study, at least for the features examined here, does not seem to be a significant predictor of gain, probably because the level of proficiency which is attained by the end of secondary school is still low.

In accordance with current theories of SLA/FLA, we can claim that the principal factor in their acquisition of Japanese is the amount and type of input and interaction available to the learners. Given the environment in which they were placed, all the eight exchange students had a massive amount of expo­sure to Japanese and although much of it was not comprehensible to them, in all, they would have benefited from large amounts of simplified comprehen­sible input and interaction. Potentially, all the Australian learners would have had maximum exposure to Japanese, attending a high school and living with Japanese families where spoken English was relatively minimal. Further­more, a variety of language models would have been available to them - host parents, peers and teachers. Nevertheless, Krashen's (1976) notion of active involvement rather than mere exposure seems relevant here, for some choice would have been available to the learner to regulate the type of input received and the interaction experienced, for example, through the development and maintenance of peer friendship networks.

The Acquisition of Politeness Patterns 221

Although I suggest that the input and interaction available to the learner will be self-regulated to some extent, the role of other personnel within the family and school and, to a lesser degree, in the community domain, is also significant. In accordance with the Japanese social norm, guests, especially foreign guests, are awarded high status and thus tend to receive special treatment, perhaps more so in comparison with students visiting other foreign countries. Based upon student reports, this support seems to extend to special language help being given to them by many host family members who take the role of attentive "caretakers". Hashimoto's (1993) study, mentioned above, shows the occurrence of conversational topics focusing upon language and much beneficial corrective activity occurring in the Japanese homestay environment. It could well be that different societies treat foreign student guests differently, and there is no doubt that secondary students in Japan generally tend to receive considerable individual attention with regard to their life in the foreign country in general and with their language acquisition in particular.

The school environment in which the exchange student is placed offers numerous opportunities for language acquisition through intensive exposure to Japanese language. It is true, nonetheless, that the regular school program involves use of much language which is not comprehensible to Australian exchange students. Even so, a fair amount of variation seems to occur in relation to the planning of suitable programs for exchange students by schools so that they attend classes where they may gain some benefit from the submersion context. The provision of beneficial private tuition in Japanese language or in other classes which especially target the non-native exchange student is another important component. The many factors which make up the school environment thus contribute to the overall involvement of the student in school life and deserve close attention in the future.

A study of exchange students aged between 15 and 18 years of age who spend a year abroad in Japan and who experience the type of informal language environment described in this study, is very important theoretically as it can add to the central debate on the relationship between comprehensible input and interaction on the one hand and acquisition on the other for learners in their teenage years. Research will thus be useful on the amount and quality of input and interaction available to these exchange students throughout their exchange period. Further in-depth studies are also needed to provide a more complete description of the features of communicative competence which

222 Helen Marriott

secondary exchange students gain together with an identification of those areas of competence in which they remain weak. With such knowledge, educators can design and implement more effective language programs for these learners subsequent to their sojourn abroad.

Notes

1. My special thanks are extended to Barbara Freed for her editorial work, and to those who helped with the test development, interviewing, transcribing and analysis.

2. The instruction for the role play did not specify the relationship between students and their homestay mother. lf the student had stayed there for some time and had established a close relationship with the mother, selection of the plain form would be the most likely norm. Given the lack of specification, the polite honorific style could also be chosen, so consequently either style was assessed as adequate.

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