Evaluating (Im)Politeness to Maintain Harmonious InterCultural Interaction between Indonesian Doctoral Students and Their Supervisors in the UK

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-563-8_28How to use a DOI?

Keywords

(Im)politeness; intercultural interaction; study abroad; moral order; overpoliteness

Abstract

International students will always engage in intercultural interactions in their study destination, both in academic and non-academic environments. These intercultural interactions also occur in the relationship between doctoral students and their PhD supervisors. One of the important elements in building harmonious intercultural interactions is intercultural competence development. In addition, one of the keys to the success of international doctoral students in completing their doctoral studies is to foster harmonious intercultural interactions with their supervisors. An aspect to maintain harmonious intercultural interactions is to understand (im)politeness between cultures. Therefore, this study will discuss what challenges international students face and how to develop intercultural competence when interacting cross-culturally with their supervisors, particularly in (im)politeness evaluation. This study took a sample of 4 PhD students from Indonesia who were doing their doctoral studies in UK universities. This qualitative study uses semi-structured interviews and is analysed using thematic analysis. The results of this study found that Indonesian students encountered various difficulties in establishing harmonious relationships at the beginning of the study period, as they encountered different expectations in terms of politeness. The themes found were over-politeness experienced by the participants. However, by encountering the problem of differences in expectations in politeness, they can develop their intercultural competence, one of which is by starting to think positively by getting to know the local culture better and evaluating the moral order in the relationship between students and supervisors. To conclude, this study found that intercultural competence can be developed to manage intercultural encounters that involve the evaluation of (im)politeness.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Erizal Lugman
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/04/28
TI  - Evaluating (Im)Politeness to Maintain Harmonious InterCultural Interaction between Indonesian Doctoral Students and Their Supervisors in the UK
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference of Research on Language 2025 (IROLE 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 376
EP  - 382
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-563-8_28
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-563-8_28
ID  - Lugman2026
ER  -