Eliciting the unsayable: Chinese teachers’ approximation elicitors in out-of-class settings

When students resist answering sensitive questions, teachers face dual pragmatic challenges: eliciting a response while mitigating the face-threat acts. This study conceptualizes teachers’ use of approximation elicitors, strategies to reformulate and approximate their initial questions. Based on the analysis of 26 recorded interactions, this study identifies three types of approximation elicitors: (1) authority-grounded elicitors, which frame the elicitation within institutional roles to legitimize the request; (2) logic-guided elicitors, which reduce the imposition on students’ negative face by scaffolding the response; (3) affective-alignment elicitors, which primarily address students’ positive face wants by demonstrating empathy, understanding, and solidarity, embodying the friendliness maxim. Furthermore, this study reveals a matching pattern between the choice of approximation elicitors and topical contexts, demonstrating that teachers’ pragmatic choices are highly sensitive to specific contexts. These approximation elicitors, grounded in Chinese style of politeness, offer a nuanced understanding of how teachers navigate sensitive communications beyond the classroom.