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When once is not enough: Politeness of multiple requests in oral proficiency interviews

Abstract The paper takes a conversation-analytic approach to examine the politeness of multiple requests in Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPI). In this assessment activity, interviewers regularly reissue a first request in environments of increased task demands or in response to candidates' difficulties with the first directive. In such multiple request sequences, two kinds of structurally parallel operations of mitigation and conventionally indirect request frames are observed. For the most part, interviewers treat mitigational material and conventionally indirect request frames as dispensable in the subsequent version, a pattern seen in multiple requests in same-turn as well as in other-initiated and third position repair. When local contingencies increase the risk that the interviewer's request may not generate the projected action, subsequent versions tend to be prefaced by the marker please. Furthermore, in environments of topic introduction or change, presequences also play a politeness-implicative role. The paper closes by considering some implications of the analysis for an interaction-based theory of politeness.