Understanding Politeness in an Online Community of Practice for Chinese ESL Teachers: Implications for Sustainable Professional Development in the Digital Era

Although politeness contributes to the effectiveness and sustainable development of online learning communities, it remains unclear how Chinese teachers of English as a second language (ESL), with differing social statuses, use varying levels of politeness when engaging in such communities. Accordingly, this paper analyses how Hong Kong ESL teachers, who tend to observe hierarchical relationships and the idiosyncrasies of “face”, conveyed politeness in an online professional community when making positive and negative evaluations and suggestions. A total of 174 interactive comments offered by 24 student teachers and 8 mentors were coded under three discourse functions and 15 types of politeness markers. Interviews with six participants indicated that, through their role in the community, they adopted ways of thinking and linguistic knowledge that influenced their choice and frequency of the politeness markers. Despite having different roles in the hierarchy, the participants exhibited similar patterns of politeness marker choice, implying that their language and cultural background influenced how they chose to convey politeness in the absence of face-to-face cues; however, their role in the community seemed to have affected the frequency of using the politeness markers. These results shed light on politeness from the perspective of the culture, language, and online community membership.