Indirectness is often used in our daily communication as a major communicative skill to keep a harmonious interpersonal relationship. From an Asian perspective, this paper is to discuss the various motives of indirectness, such as: politeness, self-protection, humor, rejection or denial, etc.

Ideology, power, and identity are truly reflected in people’s daily discourse including mark negotiation discourse of students. Peculiar power relations in Iranian academic settings and the unique features of politeness in Farsi extending up to Ta’arof motivated the researcher to statistically analyze a total of 50 mark negotiation discourse samples of Iranian university students from diverse d...

alternative assessment approaches received considerable attention soon after a discontent with traditional, one-shot testing. these approaches, however, have been used only to improve learners’ linguistic ability despite communicative models of language which pointed that knowledge of language also involves pragmatic ability (bachman, 1990; bachman & palmer, 1996). the present study tries t...