Metapragmatic Awareness of Politeness in Student–AI Prompting: A Sociopragmatic Study

Abstract

This study is motivated by students' politeness in composing prompts to AI when seeking assistance with academic tasks. The central issue addressed here is the as-yet unrealized awareness among students regarding such politeness, along with the factors underlying it. This study aims to describe the forms of students' metapragmatic awareness and to identify the sociopragmatic factors that underlie it in their interactions with AI. Employing a descriptive qualitative method, the study analyzes 154 utterances drawn from retrospective interviews with six informants from various universities in the city of Semarang. The findings show that 85 of the 154 utterances (55.2%) displayed at least one form of metapragmatic awareness, with explicit naming of strategy emerging as the most dominant form (28 instances, 32.9%). Meanwhile, 109 of the 154 utterances (70.8%) contained at least one sociopragmatic factor, with rights and obligations as the most dominant factor (34 instances, 31.2%), followed by power relations (33 instances). The study further reveals an asymmetry between these two dimensions, indicating that students more frequently exhibited implicit sociopragmatic beliefs than metapragmatic awareness that was genuinely and explicitly verbalized.