AN EXAMINATION OF E- POLITENESS AMONG NATIVE AND NON- NATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISHSTUDENTS WRITING EMAILS TO FACULTY: AN EXAMINATION OF E- POLITENESS AMONG NATIVE AND NON- NATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISHPaginated PDF Version. Sigrun Biesenbach- Lucas. Georgetown University. ABSTRACTThis study combines interlanguage pragmatics and speech act research with computer- mediated communication and examines how native and non- native speakers of English formulate low- and high- imposition requests to faculty. While some research claims that email, due to absence of non- verbal cues, encourages informal language, other research has claimed the opposite. However, email technology also allows writers to plan and revise messages before sending them, thus affording the opportunity to edit not only for grammar and mechanics, but also for pragmatic clarity and politeness. The study examines email requests sent by native and non- native English speaking graduate students to faculty at a major American university over a period of several semesters and applies Blum- Kulka, House, and Kasper’s (1. Results show that far more requests are realized through direct strategies as well as hints than conventionally indirect strategies typically found in comparative speech act studies. Politeness conventions in email, a text- only medium with little guidance in the academic institutional hierarchy, appear to be a work in progress, and native speakers demonstrate greater resources in creating e- polite messages to their professors than non- native speakers. A possible avenue for pedagogical intervention with regard to instruction in and acquisition of politeness routines in hierarchically upward email communication is presented. INTRODUCTIONAs email is becoming an accepted means of communication between university students and their professors, reports of faculty disturbed by the frequency of their students’ email messages as well as the content and linguistic form of these messages abound. As they are both face-threatening by nature, and as their realization can vary considerably according to situation of. For reasons of space, readers are referred to that.Complaints range from unreasonable requests in which students ask faculty to read drafts of students’ papers, copy notes for students who missed classes, or provide students with information that is already available on the class syllabus, to inappropriate salutations, abbreviations, spelling and grammar errors, and impolite tone (see Glater, 2. Inside Higher Ed, 2. Hartford & Bardovi- Harlig, 1. Few such complaints have been raised about students abusing their professors’ phone lines or voice mail. Professors, as well as researchers, attribute this perceived inappropriate use of email by students in communications with them as stemming from . Baron, 2. 00. 2), and an influence of modern technology (e. Baron, 1. 98. 4; Halliday, 1. Cameron (2. 00. 3) speculates that communication in general is increasingly characterized by a . Another explanation is the absence of social context cues in computer- mediated communication (CMC), which . However, it might also be the case that students are simply uncertain about email etiquette due to lack of experience and because typically it is not explicitly taught. Email writers’ ambivalence and uncertainty about how to encode communicative intent in this text- only medium tend to surface especially in hierarchical relationships, such as between students and faculty, and in situations involving impositions on the addressee. Appropriate models for emails from students to faculty are lacking (since students usually do not share their emails to their professors with one another), and feedback on the impression a student’s email leaves on its recipient is not usually provided explicitly (Chen, 2. PhD thesis Supervised by Dr. Brenner, 2. 00. 6, for how feedback is often given in the corporate world); thus, students may model their own messages after those they receive (Crystal, 2. As a result, crafting an appropriate and effective email message to an authority figure takes a lot of guesswork. Jacob Mey - A Festschrift. Chennai: Emerald: 9-17. Corpus annotation: a welcome addition or an interpretation too far? The 16-strong tagset captures things like apologies. Cross-cultural pragmatics: requests and. Students’ uncertainty is further exacerbated as different professors have different reactions to student emails. Some are more accepting: . Li, 2. 00. 0); some include specific guidelines in their syllabi regarding email etiquette, as the following example shows. If your message does not pass my 'test' in all four respects, it will be returned to you with a message stating, 'This message is inappropriate for review. That students, even non- native speakers of English, are nevertheless aware of stylistic differences required in email communication with authority figures as opposed to peers and act upon their awareness is supported by several researchers (Chen, 2. Danet, 2. 00. 1; Herring, 2. In most student- faculty email interaction, students know the professor to whom they are writing, and . Conversational Maxim View of Politeness: Focus on Politeness Implicatures Raised in Performing Persian Offers and Invitations. Indirectness and politeness in Turkish–German bilingual and Turkish monolingual requests. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies (Appendix: the CCSARP coding manual.) Ablex, Norwood, NJ (1989) Blum-Kulka and. Version of the apology strategy typology outlined in the CCSARP Coding Manual for Apologies (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989, pp. The modifications were made to. Download Politeness, Face and Apologies To continue. Read Politeness, Face and Apologies text. Act Realization Project Coding Manual for Apologies and a. Similarly, Danet (2. Furthermore, the asynchronous nature of email might in fact promote appropriately polite messages because writers can take time to construct and revise messages in efforts to . If students can, in principle, be expected to have the ability and means to write status- congruent email messages to faculty, one can also expect that such messages might be characterized by features that reflect greater formality, what might be termed e- politeness in the email medium. More specifically, students’ email requests of faculty might exhibit indirectness rather than directness, as well as lexical and syntactic strategies to mitigate requestive force. Some previous studies, however, have conflated various request types (e. Chen, 2. 00. 6; Hartford & Bardovi- Harlig, 1. Biesenbach- Lucas, 2. Issues of e- politeness might be more noticeable if the imposition on the faculty recipient is greater. As a result, the present study examines if request strategies in student- professor emails vary with increasing imposition of the request, and if such email requests are mitigated – and thus rendered more e- polite – through syntactic and lexical devices, as well as request perspective. A significant focus of the study is on how the request strategies of native speaker (NS) and non- native speaker (NNS) students differ. The following questions guided the research: Do students’ emails to professors promote more direct or indirect request strategies? Does directness level vary with increasing imposition of request? And, is there evidence of politeness features that mitigate students’ email requests? Do request strategies and politeness features of NSs’ and NNSs’ emails differ? Is there a preferred linguistic realization by NSs and NNSs speakers for different request types? Answers to such questions can shed light on the growing body of research on (1) institutional email practice and the complex interplay between demands for politeness conventions and adaptation to an increasingly CMC. PREVIOUS RESEARCH Socialization into Email Writing Practices: Hitting a Moving Target. As anasynchronous medium, email presents users in all interactional domains with questions as to what is acceptable to do via email (i. While just a few years ago it would have been a serious gaffe in etiquette to respond to a job announcement via email and to send one’s cover letter as the message and the resum. Similarly, in the academic domain, where most student- professor interaction occurs during office hours, in class, before and after class, and perhaps on the phone, email has become a viable alternative means of communication, providing the convenience of obtaining clarification, feedback, and permission almost instantly when students need it. Email consultation with faculty can be seen as a recent variation of gate- keeping encounters. Therefore, the question of which topics and communication purposes are appropriate to address with faculty, and in which way, is an essential one. Studies investigating the communication purposes for which students use email with their professors have found similar facilitative and academic functions: building a relationship, getting information/advice about course materials and quizzes, addressing late work and missed classes, challenging grades, showing interest in and understanding of course material, and . Collins, 1. 99. 8; Marbach- Ad & Sokolove, 2. Payne, 1. 99. 7; Poling, 1. A difference between NSs’ and NNSs’ email interaction with faculty is the presence of phatic communication in NNSs’ messages, not . Biesenbach- Lucas (2. NNSs’ email messages often consisted of adding one phatic expression after another, which buried and . Similarly, asking for help via email and thus coming across as a . U. S. Communication styles and conventions are typically shared in speech communities and learned by new apprentices over a course of years. However, email, as a relatively recent development, is not yet governed by clear conventions and expectations. Typically, students must behave and use language in status- congruent, or status- appropriate, ways (Bardovi- Harlig & Hartford, 1. For example, issuing directives, setting expectations, or determining whether or not work is sufficient are not examples of status- congruent language functions for students (Boxer, 2. In face- to- face encounters, traditional power routines tend to be exercised (Drake, Yuthas, & Dillard, 2. Email use in academia is still a language- using situation with less clearly defined constraints, despite the fact that many of today’s students have grown up with email and other CMC technology (Malley, 2. Socialization into acceptable email interaction is subtle and without much guidance. Books on email netiquette (e. Flynn & Flynn, 1. Hale & Scanlon, 1. Unless students are exposed to recent books primarily targeting writing for English as a Second Language (ESL) that explicitly address email use in academia (e. Swales & Feak, 2. ESL teachers incorporate email composition into their syllabi, students are left to their own devices in trying to craft a message that is effective as well as status- congruent and polite.
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