Innovation in Language Learning

Politeness research has attracted the attention of many researchers who have focused mainly on politeness strategies and maxims (Leech, 1983; Brown & Levinson, 1987; Blum-Kulka, 1987, 1989; Watts, 2003; Leech & Tatiana, 2014; Locher & Larina, 2019, among others). However, none of these studies have emphasised the role of politeness markers in softening the request imposition in cross-cultural academic contexts. The current study investigates and compares the students’ use of politeness markers while requesting their teachers and classmates in Russian and Algerian academic discourse. More specifically, it concentrates on Algerian and Russian equivalents of the English apologising term ‘sorry/ اسمحلي/ Извините’ in students requests. The study used a discourse completion task (DCT) to elicit data from 140 Algerian and Russian university students. The results show that the Algerian apologising term ‘اسمحلي/ اسمحيلي’ is less frequent than the Russian ‘Извините’; however, Algerian students chose to apologise more when the request was directed to teachers and less when requesting other classmates. On the other hand, извини(те) was used repeatedly by Russian students in both cases of request. The study found that the students’ tendency to apologise to teachers rather than other requestees is determined by the index of social power and distance between students and teachers, which is perceived longer in Algerian culture than in Russian. The study contributes to cross-cultural pragmatics and studies on classroom discourse.