Mohd Noor Be, Nur Iylia and Abdul Latif @ Bapoo, Lilisuriani and Idrus, Azean Idruwani and Umu Aiman, Batrisyia
(2025)
He says, she says: gender differences in use of persuasive appeals, politeness strategies and grammatical mood across social power communication contexts.
In: 5th International Conference on Islamic Contemporary Issue and Management (ICICM2025), 2025, Kangar, Perlis, Malaysia.
Abstract
Persuasive speaking is a skill that requires speakers to strategically employ
language to achieve desired outcomes. Although numerous studies have
explored the delivery of persuasive messages, limited attention has been given
to how non-native female and male speakers of English integrate politeness
strategies and grammatical mood to construct Aristotelian logical, emotional,
and credibility appeals when communicating with interlocutors of varying
status within social contexts. Grounded in Aristotelian persuasive appeals,
Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, and Fahnestock’s classification of
grammatical mood, this study investigated how non-native female and male
speakers of English integrated politeness strategies and grammatical mood in
persuasive appeals when addressing a friend and a boss within social English
communication contexts. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were employed
on the responses gathered through a Discourse Completion Task (DCT). The
study involved 26 undergraduate international students from a higher
education institution who attended a persuasive speaking skills workshop in
Perlis, Malaysia. The findings revealed that when speaking to a friend, female
participants used logical appeals with indicative moods and negative politeness
strategies. When addressing a boss, they shifted to credibility appeals with
indicative moods, accompanied by positive politeness strategies. Male
participants, on the other hand, often employed credibility appeals with
indicative moods and positive politeness strategies when communicating with
a friend. When addressing a boss, emotional appeals are employed through
both bald-on-record and off-record strategies, as well as imperative moods.
While these results suggest that female and male speakers integrate distinct
choices of politeness approaches and mood in different persuasive appeals
when persuading in contexts given, the politeness strategies commonly
employed by the male participants when speaking to a person of higher social
status were rather unexpected. Some respondents’ choices of words also
indicated that they were not sure what persuasion means. Future studies can
investigate non-native English speakers’ understanding of persuasion and
explore how ESL/EFL speakers use politeness strategies and mood to
construct persuasive appeals in professional contexts.
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