Questioning in class is often found by students to be highly stressful and a cause of anxiety. Lower-order questions, in particular, are often closely linked to behaviour management, with teachers using them as a means of control in the classroom while e.g. manipulating or accusing. The fact that questions are mainly initiated by teachers ( they ask up to two questions every minute and questioning may account for even up to a third of all teaching time) and that there exists a strong asymmetric relationship in their number (students, on average ask not more than 6 questions during one lesson) may have a tremendous impact on students’ emotional well-being and their learning. This asymmetric relationship stems from differences of status, roles, age, education or class and can give teachers power or authority. Questions are commonly used as part of a power struggle, and pupils can still fi nd this sort of interrogation intimidating. Thus teacher’s questioning (Mitchell cited in Hastings 2003) has been found children’s main source of fear and face-threatening act – the learners are not afraid of being wrong, but of looking silly – saying something that will be ridiculed by the teacher or other pupils. It is well known that FTAs threatening the hearer’s self-image include expressions negatively evaluating the hearer’s positive face, e.g. disapproval, accusations, disagreement or criticism and all of these elements are commonly appearing in teacher’s discourse and questions they ask. Those of the lower status and less dominant role (students) use more indirectness and more negative politeness features, such as hedges and mitigation, than those with the higher status (teachers) do (Cutting 2002). The article also aims at presenting Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive learning (1956) and the influence the language of teacher’s questions may have on students experiencing face-threatening acts.

Attitudes, or a person’s internal/mental beliefs about a specific situation, object or concept can greatly influence behaviors. This truth also applies to linguistic choices made by second language students. Their low level of knowledge of cross-cultural differences as well as pragmatic competence intertwined with inner norms and attitude towards politeness can result in producing the discourse which could not be considered appropriate. The fact of using and learning a second language (being bilingual or multilingual) may influence the level of politeness. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the differences existing in the scope of politeness revealed in the written, contrastive (Polish-English) discourse. The corpus under investigation encompasses seventy six emails written in the two languages by English philology students of teachers faculty. The analysis focuses on the level of politeness as exhibited through various forms of hedges and mitigations used both in the Polish and English language.