Email Communication in the EFL classroom
3. Email as a form of computer-mediated communication
3.2 Doing politeness: Students’ emails to academic staff
In this section, research on emails in a university setting, that is, mostly email communication between teaching staff and students1, is discussed in more detail
1 Many of the studies on email communication focus on this communicative context, for an overview of studies on email communication see Dürscheid and Frehner (2013). For an extensive literature review on student-faculty email requests, see e.g. Economidou- Kogetsidis (2011).
and highlights some of the challenges both native and non-native speakers of English face when initiating an exchange. The first part outlines findings focussing on native speakers of English, while the second part discusses studies that either compare native and non-native language email communication or focus on the problems arising from the strategies employed by English as a Second Language (ESL) and/or English as a Foreign language (EFL) speakers. The majority of stud- ies in this field analyses students’ emails sent to staff, with most of them focussing on email requests, for example asking for a meeting or feedback. It highlights that there seem to be manifold underlying (social) norms and expectations that may influence the recipients’ attitude towards the sender and the request and also il- lustrates that emails written by EFL learners may be perceived as being imposing and impolite.
3.2.1 Recipients’ perceptions of native speaker email requests
Using “overly casual” language in emails, including abbreviations, when writing to university staff may have a negative impact on the student-instructor relationship (Stephens/Houser/Cowan 2009). In their experimental study investigating the attitudes of students and academic staff on email style at an American university, Stephens et al. (2009: 318) found that “overly casual email messages sent to instruc- tors cause the instructor to like the student less, view them as less credible, have a lesser opinion of the message quality, and make them less willing to comply with students’ simple email requests”. ‘Formal’ emails in this study included a formal greeting and closing, standard punctuation and spelling, whereas the ‘casual’ emails contained neither a greeting nor a closing formula, exhibited many examples of non-standard spelling and punctuation, and also included examples of “shortcuts commonly found in text messaging” (ibid.: 309). In this study, the difference be- tween the two email styles was very pronounced; it might be interesting to see how academic staff view emails that could be located somewhere less extreme on the cline between conceptual orality and literacy. In another widely cited experimental study (Jessmer/Andersson 2001), emails which were grammatically correct were viewed more positively than those that were what is termed “ungrammatical” in this study (e.g. typos, omitted punctuation marks, spelling mistakes and “fractured grammar”, i.e. ellipses) (ibid.: 335).
Viewing these studies in the light of Koch and Oesterreicher’s model of im- mediacy and distance, it could be concluded that the negative attitude towards emails that contain conceptually oral features, for example ellipses, stems from a mismatch in the perceived levels of communicative distance of the interlocu- tors. The recipients may interpret emails that contain conceptually oral language
as being overly familiar and therefore inappropriate in a context in which they expect conceptually written communication associated with a greater degree of communicative distance.
Biesenbach-Lucas (2005: 41) advocates explicit instructions in how to com- pose emails and explicit practice of how to write email messages for university students in general. Furthermore, she makes the suggestion that “instructors at American universities could let [both international and American] students […]
know explicitly for what purposes they consider emails from students appropriate”
(ibid.), thereby providing students with guidance on what is considered accept- able and what is not.
Merely knowing what is expected and how to meet these expectations following strict guidelines may, however, not be enough. Knupsky/Nagy-Bell (2011: 110) argue that “students’ ability to appropriately modify email style could convey edu- cational advantages”; in other words, being aware of the factors that shape email communication and being able to adapt to various context is a valuable skill for anyone composing an email.
3.2.2 ESL/EFL email communication in university settings
The effects of a potential clash between the communicative intentions of the sender and the expectations of the recipient as well as the need for some form of guidance or instruction are also apparent in studies that analyse email requests to university staff sent by ESL/EFL speakers.
Economidou-Kogetsidis (2011) identified what she calls “pragmatic failure”
when non-speakers write to academic staff in English. Her study analysed emails written by Greek L2 speakers of English and asked British native speaker uni- versity lecturers to assess the appropriateness, more specifically politeness and abruptness, of these six authentic email messages using an online questionnaire (ibid.: 3199).
The results revealed that the NNS [non-native speakers] students resorted largely to direct strategies (rather than conventional indirectness) both in the case of requests for action and for information, with the imperative (‘please + imperative’), direct questions and want statements as the most preferred substrategies. (ibid.: 3206)
Some of the emails also contained dispreferred greetings, for example title and first name, which is “an acceptable construction in Greek” (ibid.: 3209), but not in English. In terms of the evaluation of the native English speakers, the omission of a salutation (classified as an avoidance strategy in this study) was perceived as abrupt and disrespectful by the assessors. The study concludes that the high
degree of directness and lack of mitigation in conjunction with the omission of greetings and closings or use of inappropriate forms of address contribute to the email being perceived as “brusque, […] which may sometimes verge on impolite- ness” (ibid.). Focussing on the speech acts used in messages sent to academic staff, Biesenbach-Lucas (2005; 2007) analysed emails written in English by American and international students and identified several differences between the two groups. In “125 student-initiated email messages, sent by students enrolled in graduate level teacher training courses” (Biesenbach-Lucas 2005: 28), she found that the American students took greater initiative and “provided more potential response points” (ibid.: 40) than international students, concluding that “the so- ciopragmatic and pragmalinguistic resources of international students are more limited than those of native-speaking peers” (ibid.: 41).
What these two studies in conjunction with the others discussed above un- derline is that email writing is a highly culturally and contextually dependent act, which is of course not very surprising. It is also not surprising that politeness strategies are transferred from the L1 to the L2, regardless of whether they are appropriate in the L2 discourse community. This could be, at least partially, due to a general lack of pragmatic awareness in EFL learners (see e.g. Bardovi-Harlig/
Dörnyei 1998; Schauer 2006).