Developing politeness skills of university students in teaching business writing

The necessity to improve business interaction and to develop new approaches to study politeness, as an essential category of communication, has determined the need to develop a methodology to teach business writing for future professionals. Thus, the paper aims to study the linguistic politeness means and further develop a system of exercises for university students to write business letters effectively based on the study of politeness. The study uses the descriptive method to determine the choice of linguistic means to express politeness as well as the method of pedagogical construction to produce an effective methodic system to write business letters in English. The results show that business letters use two types of politeness strategies: the intimacy strategy (aiming at establishing and developing business contacts) and the distance strategy (aiming at preventing conflicts). These strategies use a particular set of speech acts that are represented by specific speech cliché or formulas. Finally, the paper suggests the methodic system including five stages: introducing the concept of politeness and its linguistic means; analyzing the means of politeness in sample business letters; developing lexical skills of politeness; writing business letters based on the samples and schemes; practicing reading and writing business letters imitating the real communicative situations.