Negotiating Politeness in Gendered Discourse: A study of the Speech Act of Request in Nigerian ESL Environment

Abstract

This study examines politeness with regard to the speech act realisation patterns of request among male and female Nigerian bilinguals with the major aim of ascertaining the effect of gender on the choice of the politeness strategies utilised using Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory as a framework. Adopting a quantitative survey design, data were elicited from 300 purposively selected participants (150 males and 150 females) drawn from Nigeria’s three major ethnic groups: Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba using an open-ended Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The DCT comprised five contextually grounded hypothetical request situations designed to approximate everyday communicative encounters. Participants’ responses were thematically organised and analysed to identify recurrent politeness strategies and the contextual factors shaping their use. Quantitative procedures, including frequency counts and percentage distributions, were employed to examine the relative occurrence of these strategies and to compare their distribution across gender groups. The findings reveal that respondents employed four of the five super-strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson—bald on-record, positive politeness, negative politeness, and off-record strategies. Notably, significant gender-based variations were observed in the choice and patterning of these strategies, suggesting that gender plays a salient role in shaping politeness behaviour in request-making within the Nigerian ESL context.