Introducing the ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ of (im)politeness

This chapter outlines the editors’ conceptualization of the key terminology that gives the collection its title, such as (im)politeness, ‘teaching’ and ‘learning.’ It describes the relationship between the field of (im)politeness research and various strands of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) studies, highlights important developments in these respective domains, and advocates an enhanced dialogue between them that can lead to positive cross-fertilization. It then outlines selected issues raised in individual chapters, as well as a theme that emerged consistently across the contributions, i.e. the role of ‘awareness’; its presence or absence is seen as variously affecting individuals’ ability to achieve accurate representations of (im)politeness notions, offsetting difficulties in language learning and the development of intercultural competence, or enabling the very perception of some facets of interpersonal relationships.