Der Ton macht die Musik: Zur Behandlung von Höflichkeit im Lehrwerk studio [21]

As we know, linguistic politeness constitutes one of the essential elements of intercultural competence, because many critical incidents are caused by the non-observance of the politeness standards of the other culture. Even basic speech acts as ‘to greet so.’ or ‘to apologise for sth.’ will only be successful if we respect verbal, paraverbal and nonverbal standards according to the interlocutor and the communication situation. That is why students of foreign languages need to be sensitised from the outset to the importance of linguistic politeness and must acquire the necessary knowledge and know-how. In this learning process, teaching materials play a prominent role. For this reason, the following contribution will analyse various volumes of “studio [21]”, representing the recent generation of textbooks for German language teaching.