Modifying self-praise in students' self-reflection journals
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The paper deals with self-praise as a speech act through which people positively evaluate their own performance (Guo and Ren 2020), a face-enhancing act directed at the speaker (Dayter 2013). Recently, there has been a growing interest in this speech act, specifically in online contexts and particular cultures. An analysis conducted on a self-compiled corpus of 150 self-reflection journals written by students of Academic English has revealed that direct explicit self-praise is very rare, as direct self-praise represents a threat to the speaker’s face (not only) in the Czech culture and is regarded as boasting or bragging. Therefore, students positively evaluating their performance in the course express it via modified self-praise (e.g., they add a disclaimer, give the credit to somebody else or use self-denigration). Furthermore, students also tend to stress praise given to them by a third party. Finally, the analysis has proved that violating the Modesty Maxim is highly undesirable in the Czech context, which might lead to interesting pedagogical implications. |