Although social status has been shown to be a fundamental motive for individuals, theories of development have largely overlooked the role of status in shaping economic and social outcomes. In tracing the historical roots of social hierarchy through the cases of race, colonialism, and caste, this article outlines the specific mechanisms through…

The present study analyses the impoliteness of criticism over social status and distance, incorporating the concept of "levels of imposition." Criticism as a fundamental speech act is commonly used by people in the modern era, either in the digital world or the real world. It usually contains impoliteness if it embodies negative…

This study explored the relationship between metapragmatic knowledge and transfer of learning from one speech act to another. Using a digital application, 105 Chinese learners of English received implicit instruction on how to formulate a high-imposition request to someone in a higher social status and larger social distance. Immediately after the…

The study aims to investigate the speech acts of international students in Universitas Muhammadiyah Surabaya in giving complaints. This study focuses on the complaint speech acts and the politeness strategy which are produced by International students who have different cultural background. This study used qualitative approach because it observed…

Studies have found that Faculty-Student Interaction (FSI) has many positive benefits for students including academic support, professional development, mentoring, and career planning. Research-intensive universities exhibit the lowest levels of faculty-student interaction within higher education. This article utilises qualitative methods to…

This study aims at exploring the linguistic habits of Iraqi Arab speakers and the situations wherein Iraqis invoke religion and the lexicon of Allah in their daily online communication. Throughout this work, it was sought to answer the question whether the religious belief of Iraqis is reflected in online chats Iraqi by involving situation-bound…

In the framework of this study, the phenomenon of transfer is probed pragma-linguistically and socio-linguistically concerning marriage situations among Iraqi EFL learners. The study also strives to look at the refusal strategies most commonly employed by Iraqi female English as a foreign Language (EFL) learners compared to their counterparts,…

The phenomena of language use in the class still become the object of study ever since the languages are essential aspects in classroom interaction. It cannot be denied that in the classroom interaction, the communicative styles of the lecturers and students will be influenced by many aspects. One of them is the social status differences which…

The present article is an attempt to read Nadin Gordimer's "The Pickup" from the lens of Foucault. It starts with Foucault's assumption that power is everything and any kind of relation in the world is defined through the discourses of power. It discusses the techniques through which the power dominates its authority over the subjects…

Ethnic prejudice, even among very young children, is a universal occurrence. Yet, little research has been conducted on this issue outside of Westernized contexts. The current study evaluated a storybook intervention in Indonesia, a country of historically high racial tensions, designed to reduce young children's ethnic bias regarding out-groups…

Using an experimental design, native majority group children (8-13 years, N = 842) evaluated acculturation strategies (assimilation, integration, and separation) adopted by immigrant and emigrant peers. There were medium to large effects of the perceived acculturation strategies on children's peer evaluations. Overall, assimilation was valued…

This paper synthesizes cross-sectional studies of the effect of proficiency on second language (L2) pragmatics to answer the synthesis question: Does proficiency affect adult learners' pragmatic competence? Findings have revealed an overall positive proficiency effect on pragmatic competence, and in most cases higher proficiency learners have…

Literacy is considered to be a public good--one that benefits not only literate people, but also others in society through mechanisms of sharing and mediation. But to what extent do the benefits of literacy extend to socially distant groups? This paper applies the sociological concept of social distance to examine how social stratification impacts…

This study examines the apology strategies used by 30 Saudi EFL teachers in Najran, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), paying special attention to variables such as social distance and power and offence severity. The study also delineates gender differences in the respondents' speech as opposed to studies that only examined speech act output by…

Learning a foreign language requires students to acquire both grammatical knowledge and socio-pragmatic rules of a language. Pragmatic competence as one of the most difficult aspects of language provides several challenges to L2 learners in the process of learning a foreign language. To overcome this problem, EFL teachers should find the most…