Evaluating perceptions of (im)politeness among Indonesian students in the UK to develop intercultural competence

Abstract

International students frequently need to interpret unfamiliar forms of politeness in study-abroad contexts. For Indonesian students in the UK, encounters involving address terms, request markers, academic feedback, and expectations of informality may create pragmatic friction that affects confidence, academic engagement, and social integration. This qualitative linguistic ethnographic study examined how five Indonesian PhD students in the UK (four men and one woman) perceived and evaluated (im)politeness during their intercultural adjustment and how these evaluations contributed to their development of intercultural competence. Data were collected through repeated semi-structured interviews and observations over eleven months. The interviews were conducted in Indonesian, translated into English with attention to pragmatic equivalence, and analysed through an evaluative approach informed by interpersonal pragmatics and Spencer-Oatey and Kádár’s model of (im)politeness evaluation. The findings show three interrelated patterns: mismatched expectations of moral order and communicative norms, negative evaluations of over-politeness and unfamiliar address practices, and emotion-laden evaluations of verbal and interactional impoliteness. The participants gradually re-evaluated these encounters by learning local pragmatic norms, interpreting formulaic expressions and feedback practices in context, and becoming more open to culturally variable politeness expectations. The study argues that perceptions of (im)politeness are not peripheral to intercultural competence but a key mechanism through which international students learn to manage rapport in multilingual academic and everyday settings.