Politeness Strategies in Textbooks on Russian as a Foreign Language

The article is devoted to the analysis of politeness strategies implemented in the textbooks of Russian as a foreign language. The success of intercultural cooperation largely depends on the participants' skills to apply communicative strategies, which allow them to maintain harmonious relationships and prevent conflicts. The paper aims to describe the distribution of positive and negative politeness techniques in learning dialogues. The undertaken contextual and pragmatic analysis resulted in identification of significant prevalence of positive politeness strategies in learning dialogues. Most frequent are the strategies: "to notice the listeners, pay attention to their interests and needs" and "to use in-group identity markers." Negative politeness strategies are less common in textbooks, with the dominance of "being conventionally indirect," "questioning and hedging," and "apologizing." This kind of distribution is noted to correspond to the peculiarities of Russian communicative behaviour, which implies intimacy and mutual understanding in converse. Special emphasis is placed on the cross- cultural differences: textbooks intended for Chinese learners commonly employ the strategies that intensify group harmony, while the material intended for European learners emphasises negative politeness strategies. It is explained by cultural diversity of the target groups.