Linguistic Politeness A Perspective for the intercultural Language Didactics

Politeness is a current topic of public discussions and empirical research and has developed to an important part of intercultural communication and didactics. An analysis of tendencies in some selected textbooks for German as a foreign language demonstrates that linguistic politeness is depicted as an integrated instead of an independent theme, and that despite increasing inter-culturalization of textbooks simple models of culture contrasts still dominate. Impulses in recent research and fields of applications are as rare as the aim of reflecting politeness even in the most current textbooks.