Politeness Strategies In Compliment Responses Among Indonesian EFL University Students

Abstract

Compliment responses constitute an important aspect of pragmatic competence because they reflect speakers' ability to maintain interpersonal relationships through appropriate language use. For English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners, responding to compliments appropriately remains challenging since it requires balancing appreciation toward the compliment giver while avoiding excessive self-praise. This study aims to investigate the politeness strategies employed by Indonesian EFL university students in responding to compliments in English. The study adopts a qualitative descriptive research design involving 30 undergraduate students enrolled in an English Education program at Universitas Riau. Data were collected through a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) consisting of ten compliment-response scenarios and followed by semi-structured interviews to explore the participants' reasons for selecting particular responses. The data were analyzed using Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson's politeness theory, which categorizes politeness into bald-on-record, positive politeness, negative politeness, and off-record strategies. The findings indicate that positive politeness is the most frequently employed strategy, primarily realized through expressions of gratitude, compliment acceptance, and agreement. Negative politeness appears when students employ modesty and self-deprecating expressions to reduce self-praise, whereas off-record and bald-on-record strategies occur less frequently. The study also reveals that the participants' choice of politeness strategies is influenced by social distance, interlocutor status, familiarity, and the communicative context. These findings demonstrate that Indonesian EFL university students generally possess adequate pragmatic awareness in responding to compliments; however, the variation in their responses suggests the need for more explicit instruction on pragmatic competence and politeness strategies in English language classrooms. The study contributes to the growing body of research on pragmatics by providing empirical evidence on compliment responses among Indonesian EFL learners and offers pedagogical implications for enhancing pragmatic competence in higher education.