Questioning and politeness strategies in the construction of students’ identity in English and Italian academic seminars

This comparative study explores the various modalities of interactive academic discourse in a corpus of English and Italian seminars. It investigates how in the two different contexts undergraduate students construct their identity and position themselves within the academic community through the interaction with their tutors. It focuses on the students' questioning strategies and their use of politeness and claims that the interplay between these two areas can usefully shed light on the nature of the academic exchanges observed.