Ritual frame indicating expressions used in requests in intercultural communication

2.1 The RFIE please in requests

The concept of RFIEs was proposed as an innovation in politeness markers. The change from considering please to be a politeness marker to considering it to be an RFIE is based on the extent to which the requestive please in different linguacultures reflects an indication of individualistic politeness or whether its use is simply habitual, which is also known as conventionalization (Kádár and House 2020a, 2021a; Li and Ji 2023; Rygg and Johansen 2023). Kádár and House (2020a, 2021a, 2021b) illustrated that both the English and the Chinese forms of please were used frequently in several standard situations in each linguaculture, as different interactants used please in requests to display their awareness of the standard situations. In these cases, using please to show politeness was not a priority – instead, the interactants used please out of habit based on the conventions of their linguacultural backgrounds. For example, a teacher, whose social power and social distance was higher than that of the students, used the RFIE please out of convention while in fact demanding that the students observed the rules in the classroom, as in “quiet, please” (Kádár and House 2020a: 154). In such cases, the interactants did not use the RFIE please to express individualistic politeness, but to follow conventional practice in different standard situations. Standard situations refer to “any situation where right and obligations prevail” (Kádár and House 2020a: 143), while a ritual frame is “a cluster of standard situations in which right and obligations prevail” (Kádár and House 2020a: 143). In other words, a ritual frame is communally oriented in different types of standard situations. Each interactant in any ritual frame overtly understands their rights and obligations, which results in pragmatic salience (Kádár and House 2021b). When different interactants in a standard situation in which conventionalization is a priority use a particular expression extensively to make requests, this expression may be considered an RFIE rather than a politeness marker.

Kádár and House (2020a, 2021a) found that the uses of the respective English and Chinese RFIEs meaning please in different standard situations (House 1989) across both linguacultures expressed different degrees of politeness in requests. Compared to the Chinese RFIE/qǐng/meaning please, the English RFIE please had a loose relationship with politeness in requests, since it was “frequently used in ancillary functions” (Kádár and House 2021a: 99). The Chinese RFIE/qǐng/and its variants, such as could you please, were “more speech act-heavy” and “tend[ed] to be deferential in style” due to the “historical origin as an honorific” of the Chinese RFIE/qǐng/(Kádár and House 2021a: 99).

The current study draws on academic discussions between Thai EFL learners and non-Thai university lecturers for the examination of RFIEs. Academic discussions were chosen for the study of requests for the following reasons: First, it is common for university lecturers and their students in Thailand to have discussions about how to complete different assignments based on the syllabus (Pan 2024b). The lecturers can assign individual or group work. To complete an assignment, the students and the lecturers discuss each other’s ideas until they reach a consensus. This communication can occur in class or after class according to each lecturer’s availability. Since the Thai language is dominant in daily communication in Thailand, an academic discussion between the Thai EFL learners and a non-Thai lecturer is the most frequently occurring type of intercultural communication in which Thai EFL learners use English as a lingua franca (ELF). Second, the academic discussions that occur in institutional discourse are regarded as a standard situation (Pan 2024b). On one hand, Thai EFL learners and non-Thai university lecturers have discrepancies in terms of social power and social distance, and academic discussions have power salience. The level of imposition was therefore assumed to be high (Çetinavcı 2020; Pan 2024b). On the other hand, both Thai EFL learners and non-Thai university lecturers in academic discussions must exchange ideas continuously to solve different on-going problems (Meston et al. 2022; Pan 2024b). In an academic discussion, a non-Thai lecturer must understand the on-going situation of the assignment. Therefore, the lecturer has the right and obligation to request different information regarding the assignment. At the same time, the lecturer has the obligation to answer any question posed by the Thai EFL learners clearly to ensure that they follow the lecturer’s requirements for completing the remainder of the assignment. By contrast, the Thai EFL learners have the right and obligation to request any information regarding the assignment, including whether the on-going situation of the assignment meets the lecturer’s requirements, the problems that they are encountering in the procedure, and whether the lecturer has any suggestions about the assignment. Thus, requests for different purposes occur naturally during such discussions (Çetinavcı 2020; Shimamoto 2022). In addition, since non-Thai lecturers have higher social status compared to Thai EFL learners, Thai EFL learners must make use of linguistic cues in requests to manifest politeness, resulting in the lowest level of imposition when making requests.

2.2 Requests made by Thai EFL learners

The studies of politeness in requests made by EFL learners from different linguacultural backgrounds have always received attention because “a request is one of the most frequently used speech acts in a person’s daily life” (Idris and Ismail 2023: 981). Several studies have found that EFL learners tended to use directness more often than indirectness in requests (Alfghe and Mohammadzadeh 2021; AlShraah et al. 2023), whereas a few studies have found that EFL learners used indirectness more often (Çetinavcı 2020; Shafran and Stavans 2023). One main reason for the differences in the findings was the participants’ different levels of English proficiency in various studies. In general, participants with “a higher proficiency level” tended to use “conventionally indirect and non-conventionally indirect strategies” to express politeness when making requests (AlShraah et al. 2023: 61). Furthermore, EFL learners generally used indirectness in combination with other types of linguistic cues, including honorifics and external modifications, more frequently when they interacted with people who had higher social power, greater social distance, or levels of imposition (Çetinavcı 2020; Izadi 2022).

Politeness is a significant component of the Thai culture (Prombut 2020; Tawilapakul 2022), in which maintaining social harmony and harmonious interpersonal relationships are of the utmost importance (Pan 2022; Pathanasin and Eschstruth 2022; Tawilapakul 2022). “[F]ace is an important concept in interpersonal relationships” in order to achieve harmony (Pan 2024a: 229). Indirectness in Thai communication is ubiquitous in order to grant face to others or to prevent them from losing face (Pan 2024a; Prombut 2020). Indirectness is also displayed in requests that Thai EFL learners make.

Previous research found that Thai EFL learners tended to use indirect interrogatives in requests, such as can I ask (Pan 2022). Thai EFL learners also used indirect interrogatives when making requests online, such as would you mind (Pathanasin and Eschstruth 2022), and tended to use honorifics to instigate requests, particularly when they intended to address requests to people with higher social status, such as lecturers and parents (Prombut 2020). These formal forms of address reflect their respect for elders “to conform to the social norms of Thai culture” (Pathanasin and Eschstruth 2022: 199). Following the formal address, the Thai EFL learners used indirect strategies to make requests, followed by certain external modifications in some instances, such as providing a reason (Ambele and Boonsuk 2018).

Despite the results illustrated above, studies of Thai EFL learners’ requests in intercultural communication have several flaws. First, the use of discourse completion tests (DCTs) has become controversial in the studies of requests (Ackermann 2023). Although a “DCT was used most frequently” in previous research (Pang et al. 2023: 45), the elicited data “tend[ed] to document ideal situations rather than real ones” (Çetinavcı 2020: 286). Conflicting findings have been observed when using DCTs in different studies (Alfghe and Mohammadzadeh 2021; AlShraah et al. 2023). These conflicting findings may have been due to the reliability of the data elicited via the DCTs, as several researchers used a written DCT rather than allowing the participants to reply orally (Pan 2023; Pang et al. 2023). Similar to the studies of general EFL learners’ requests worldwide, many studies of Thai EFL learners’ requests have only used DCTs to elicit the data (Prombut 2020). Since little research has included naturally occurring data, the ways in which Thai EFL learners make use of different linguistic cues in requests in intercultural communication remain unknown. Moreover, cultural factors, such as social norms, have an impact on EFL learners from different linguacultural backgrounds in terms of their use of direct or indirect requests with different linguistic cues (McConachy and Spencer-Oatey 2021; Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2021). The influence of cultural factors was also found in the use of RFIEs. According to Kádár and House (2020b), L1 English speakers considered L1 Chinese speakers’ use of the RFIE please in several standard situations to be over-politeness. This different understanding was caused by the different social norms and social values regarding politeness in interpersonal relationships in interactions (Kádár and House 2020b; Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2021).

Accordingly, the RFIEs that Thai EFL learners used in academic discussions in ELF were investigated in this research. In this regard, the present study informs both the study of requests and the study of the RFIEs that Thai EFL learners use in intercultural communication. Thai EFL learners may employ a variety of linguistic cues as different request strategies in order to maintain harmonious interpersonal relationships and to show politeness to their lecturers. Whether the frequent use of a certain linguistic cue is due to individual politeness or due to convention increases the understanding of EFL learners’ use of RFIEs in requests in intercultural communication. Furthermore, since these linguistic cues in Thai EFL learners’ requests were produced in intercultural communications in which different interactants had different linguacultural backgrounds, the linguistic cues that the Thai EFL learners used in requests may have resulted in inappropriateness (Kádár and House 2020b; Kecskés 2022; Pan 2024a). Hence, the examination of Thai EFL learners’ use of RFIEs in intercultural communication is essential. Drawing on the series of studies of the RFIE please by Kádár and House reviewed above, Thai EFL learners’ use of the RFIE please in intercultural communication was examined first in this research, followed by the examination of the use of any other RFIEs that these learners used in intercultural communication.

3.1 Participants and data collection

The current study involved 32 Thai EFL university students, as well as 30 non-Thai university students whose L1 was English, including 18 American, 7 Australian, and 5 British students. Moreover, six American university lecturers participated in the research. Hence, 68 participants were involved in this research in total, of which 43 were males (63 %) and 25 were females (37 %). However, gender was not considered as a variable in this study. All the Thai student participants, whose ages ranged from 18 to 23, were in year one to year three and were studying at the same university in Bangkok, Thailand, during the data collection. All the non-Thai student participants, whose ages ranged from 19 to 22, were in year two to year four and were studying at four different universities in Bangkok, Thailand, during the data collection; 16 of them were full-time students and 14 were exchange students. All the participants involved in this research consented to the research process prior to the data collection.

All the Thai student participants had studied EFL for between 13 and 16 years. None of the participants had studied English in an English-speaking country at the time of the data collection. All the participants had an intermediate level of English proficiency based on their recent, valid scores for international English examinations, such as the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC), and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR; Council of Europe 2020). Intermediate-level Thai EFL university students were selected because the intermediate level is the generally required level of English proficiency for Thai university students (Pan 2022).

Following Kádár and House (2020a), data from both dyadic and multiparty communications were collected. Each Thai student participant was requested to record an academic discussion with a non-Thai lecturer in a dyadic intercultural communication situation, and to record an academic group discussion with a non-Thai lecturer in a multiparty intercultural communication situation. The student participants had been allocated to groups of four to five participants prior to the data collection. The researcher collected 32 dyadic intercultural communications (7 h of audio recordings) and 5 multiparty intercultural communications (2 h of audio recordings).

To make the situations comparable, each non-Thai participant was requested to record a dyadic academic discussion with a non-Thai university lecturer and a multiparty academic group discussion with a non-Thai lecturer. English was used as the language in both types of the aforementioned communications. The researcher collected 30 dyadic L1 English communications (7.5 h of audio recordings) and 5 multiparty L1 English communications (2 h of audio recordings). The data in this research were considered to be naturally occurring data because all the communications occurred naturally and the participants were only requested to record them.

Once all the recordings had been submitted to the researcher, the student participants were asked to complete a follow-up online survey in English consisting of two questions to elicit their views regarding politeness in communication. The first question was, “Do you think you were polite in each discussion?”. The second question was, “In what ways did you attempt to be polite?”. All the non-Thai lecturers were also asked two questions in the follow-up online survey. The first question was, “Do you think the students were polite in each discussion?”. The second question was, “In what ways did they attempt to be polite?”.

3.2 Data analysis

The ELAN MacOS Version 2023 was used to transcribe the spoken data (ELAN 2023). It is a program that provides researchers with different annotation tiers for audio or video recordings based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML) format. Two corpora were built for the present research, namely the Intercultural Communication Corpus (ICC) and the English Communication Corpus (ECC). The ICC contained 62,914 tokens and the ECC contained 79,286 tokens.

A mixed-method approach combining both quantitative and qualitative analyses was adopted in this study. Following Kádár and House (2020a, 2021a), the bottom-up approach was used to examine whether the Thai EFL learners used the RFIE please in requests in intercultural communication. The bottom-up approach allowed for the identification of the RFIE please in the different given contexts. First, the word please, as well as its variants including can/could you please, if you please, and any other variants in which please was used in requests, were retrieved using AntConc (2023). According to Kádár and House (2020a), an RFIE should be above 2.5 % of the raw frequency (RF) in order to be considered an RFIE in a standard situation. Two raters who studied requests in politeness and RFIEs examined each instance to determine whether the use of please was to make a request (the inter-rater reliability was 0.992). In addition, the number of student participants who used the requestive please was calculated because it is assumed that an RFIE that is simply used out of habit will be produced by the majority of the interactants (Kádár and House 2020a, 2021a). Moreover, the students’ and lecturers’ responses to the interview questions could reveal the perspectives of politeness directly from the participants with different linguacultural backgrounds.

The bottom-up approach was also used to determine whether the Thai EFL learners used any RFIEs in requests in intercultural communication. This research followed the direct and indirect strategies used in previous studies of requests. AntConc was used to retrieve the frequently used keywords when making requests, as shown in Table 1 below:

The steps in determining whether the Thai EFL learners used any RFIEs when making requests in intercultural communication were the same as those used to determine the use of the RFIE please presented above. It should be noted that the ECC was mainly used to compare the different understandings of the use of any RFIE from the linguacultural perspective following Kádár and House’s (2020a, 2021a) recent studies of RFIEs. Hence, it was not considered the norm for the use of any of the RFIEs in this research.

4.1 The disappearance of please

Table 2 below presents the RFs for the use of please in requests in both the ICC and the ECC.

There were nine instances of the use of the requestive please by the Thai participants and eight instances of use by the English L1 student participants. All the instances of the use of the requestive please were in requestive interrogatives that started with “can” or “could”. No use of please as a single requestive word was found in either corpus. As shown in Table 2, compared to the English L1 student participants, the Thai participants only used the requestive please in the requestive interrogatives that collocated with “can”, as the three examples below demonstrate:

As examples (1) and (3) above show, the Thai participants began requests by using an honorific, such as “teacher” in (1) and “ajarn” in (3). The word “ajarn”/aa-jaan/is a transliterated word from the Thai language, meaning “university lecturers”. It is generally used by Thai students when interacting with university lecturers in English (Huttayavilaiphan 2022; Pan 2022). A total of six out of nine instances (67 %) included the same or similar honorifics as the ones demonstrated in examples (1) and (3) above. This shows that the Thai students tended to use honorifics in requests in intercultural communication (Ambele and Boonsuk 2018; Pan 2022; Prombut 2020). Following the honorifics, the Thai participants used “can I” or “can you” to lead the requestive interrogatives as a conventionally indirect strategy (Çetinavcı 2020; Oktavia et al. 2023). As the three examples demonstrate, the Thai participants inserted the requestive please in different positions, including at the end of the interrogative in (1), after “can I ask” in (2), and after “can I” to produce the expression “can I please” in (3). The positions of the requestive please differed from those in the L1 English student participants’ utterances, in which the expressions “can I please” and “can you please” were used, as demonstrated in examples (4) and (5) below:

As both examples demonstrate, the English L1 university student participants did not use any honorifics to initiate their requests. By contrast, they used a conventional indirectness strategy by saying “can I please” or “can you please”. In addition, certain external modifications were found following the requestive interrogatives used by the English L1 university student participants, such as “we haven’t got a clue” in example (5), whereas the Thai participants rarely used external modifications.

Moreover, no Thai participant used “could…please” in requests, while four instances were found in the ECC, as the two examples below demonstrate:

As these examples show, the L1 English university student participants used “could you please” and “could I please” as requestive interrogatives. The same requestive pattern was also found in previous research on their use by L1 English speakers (House 1989; Islentyeva et al. 2023).

Based on the threshold proposed by Kádár and House (2020a), namely that an RFIE should be above 2.5 % of the RFs, the use of the requestive please satisfied this condition in both corpora, as illustrated in Table 2. However, it was noted that only five Thai participants (16 %) and three L1 English participants (10 %) used the requestive please in both dyadic and multiparty academic discussions, indicating that the requestive please was not used frequently by the younger generation of university students in intercultural academic discussions that were conducted in English with English-speaking university lecturers. Unlike several previous studies in which the single requestive please was found (Islentyeva et al. 2023; Kádár and House 2020a, 2021a; Murphy and De Felice 2019), there was no use of the single requestive please by either the student participants or the lecturers in the present research. This divergent finding may have been due to the different backgrounds of the participants, as well as differences in the experimental settings. In contrast to the use of existing corpora, such as the British National Corpus 2014 (Islentyeva et al. 2023), this research used data obtained from university students, and the type of communication was institutional discourse. Therefore, the results above reflect that neither the L1 English university students nor the Thai intermediate-level EFL learners used the word please to make requests in academic discussions. Although both the Thai and the L1 English participants used the word please in requestive interrogatives in combination with the words “can” and “could”, the frequency of the use of these requestive interrogatives including the word please was low. In addition, the number of participants who used the requestive interrogatives with the word please was limited. Furthermore, the student participants’ responses to the interview questions did not mention the use of the requestive please although they did mention other linguistic cues, as will be discussed in the following sections. Under these circumstances, despite the satisfaction with the threshold from the quantitative perspective, based on the close examination of the use of please by the Thai participants, the word please was not considered to be an RFIE in intercultural communication.

4.2 RFIEs in intercultural communication

Based on Table 1 (see Section 3.2), all utterances regarding both direct and indirect request strategies illustrated by the Thai and the L1 English participants were initially confirmed by both raters. AntConc was subsequently used to sort the frequency list of the individual words that the participants used in relation to requests. This step was implemented to follow Kádár and House’s (2020a, 2021a) study of RFIEs based on the single word please. The threshold for the potential RFIEs (2.5 %) was considered first. Potential RFIEs that did not reach this threshold were excluded. Moreover, Kádár and House (2020a: 144) stated that any expression that indicated awareness of the “context of situation and the interpersonal relationships in the context” can be considered an RFIE, including honorifics. Thus, three individual words that had the potential to be RFIEs that the Thai intermediate-level EFL learners used in academic discussions were found, as illustrated in Table 3 below.

The word “teacher” was used in 52 instances, 33 instances (63 %) of which were in relation to requests made by the Thai participants. As illustrated in the previous section, the Thai student participants tended to use “teacher” first before asking for something from the lecturer. This honorific reveals the Thai students’ respect for the university lecturers according to the social norms in Thai culture (Pan 2024a; Tawilapakul 2022). This view was also revealed in the Thai student participants’ responses to the interview questions, as the three examples below demonstrate:

The examples of the Thai student participants’ responses reflect that the use of the honorific “teacher” prior to making requests was largely influenced by Thai culture and social norms, as younger generations are expected to respect their elders (Huttayavilaiphan 2022; Pan 2024a). Since university lecturers have higher social status than their students, and the students’ requests are assumed to impose on the lecturers’ personal space (Çetinavcı 2020), the Thai student participants used the honorific “teacher” before making requests to show their respect, and to mitigate the degree of imposition when requesting (Ackermann 2023).

Similar to the use of the honorific “teacher”, the word “ajarn”, which is a Thai word meaning “university lecturers”, was also used frequently in the Thai student participants’ requests. The word “ajarn” was used in 58 instances, 41 (71 %) of which were in relation to the Thai participants’ requests. Both the honorifics “teacher” and “ajarn” were used not only before the requestive interrogatives shown in examples (1) and (3) in the previous section, but also before a few instances of direct or unconventionally indirect requests, as shown in examples (11) and (12) below:

In contrast to the situation in the ECC in which no use of either honorific was found at the beginning of the requests that the L1 English student participants made, the Thai participants tended to insert honorifics at the beginning of requests. The RFs for the use of “teacher” and “ajarn” in relation to the requests made by the Thai student participants in both dyadic and multiparty academic discussions reached the threshold proposed by Kádár and House (2020a), namely that an RFIE should be above 2.5 % of the RFs, as illustrated in Table 3. In addition, a total of 21 Thai student participants (66 %) used either “teacher”, “ajarn”, or both when making requests to the university lecturers, indicating that a relatively high number of the Thai participants involved in this research used these honorifics when making requests. Based on all of the analyses above, the Thai student participants’ use of the words “teacher” and “ajarn” in relation to requests in academic discussions, means that these two words can be considered RFIEs.

Moreover, as Table 3 illustrates, the modal verb “can” was used frequently in requests in both corpora. The Thai student participants used the modal verb “can” frequently in both dyadic and multiparty academic discussions. There were 31 out of 34 uses of “can” (91 %) by Thai student participants in dyadic academic discussions, and 38 out of 43 uses of “can” (88 %) in multiparty academic discussions, as shown in examples (13) and (14) below.

Compared to examples (1) and (3), the main difference was the disappearance of the requestive please in the two examples above, in which the honorific “teacher” and the modal verb “can” were used at the beginning of the requestive interrogatives. Furthermore, an external modification was used in (14) in an attempt to support the request. The use of the honorific and the external modification may have been intended to mitigate the potential imposition on others (Ackermann 2023; Pathanasin and Eschstruth 2022). The frequency of the Thai student participants’ use of “can” in requests was similar to that of the L1 English participants, as Table 3 illustrates. In addition, a total of 30 Thai student participants (94 %) used “can” to make requests, thus indicating the Thai student participants’ ubiquitous use of “can” in requests in academic discussions. This may indicate that the Thai student participants’ use of “can” was habitual rather than demonstrating individualistic politeness. Furthermore, in the responses to the interviews, 21 of the 32 (66 %) Thai student participants mentioned that they had shown politeness to the lecturers because they asked questions politely and indirectly, as the two original responses below illustrate:

As the responses reveal, the Thai student participants’ frequent uses of “can” to begin the requestive interrogatives showed that they were aware that they had used indirect requestive interrogatives to demonstrate discursive politeness to the lecturers (Huttayavilaiphan 2022; Kecskés 2022; Spencer-Oatey and Kádár 2021). Both of the examples above reflect that the Thai students used indirectness to show politeness to the lecturers. Accordingly, it was concluded that the Thai EFL participants’ uses of “can” in requests in the academic discussions with power salience could be regarded as RFIEs.