Victòria Codina

Given the power imbalance between students and faculty members, many studies on email communication have focused on how email requests are performed in an academic setting. Research has illustrated that power-incongruent emails can lead to pragmatic failure and cause a negative effect on the email recipient. The present study explores how contextual variables, such as social distance, power and imposition are perceived by EFL students in three different situations in an academic context.

This study examined the influence of social and power distance on students’ preferences of openings and closings and requestive strategies used when sending an email in an academic context. Students were more conventionally indirect with a person of higher power and greater social distance as well as when writing to their peers. However, email directness increased in emails to a faculty member with whom they maintain a closer social distance despite their status-unequal relationship.

The present study analyses teenage students’ use of e-mail requests and students’ and teachers’ perception of e-mail politeness during academic cyber-consultation. The data for this study come from a corpus of e-mails that 59 teenagers − 29 British English Speakers (BES), and 30 International English speakers (IES) − following the international Baccalaureate curriculum sent to their learning mentors. The e-mail requests were analyzed with regard to level of directness, and amount and type of mitigation.

La importància d’aspectes discursius en l’ensenyament i aprenentatge de segones llengües s’ha fet palesa en les últimes dècades, sobretot a partir de la presència de l’enfocament comunicatiu en l’ensenyament. Com a conseqüència d’aquesta visió, diversos estudis s’han dut a terme tot considerant el desenvolupament i la promoció de la competència comunicativa dels aprenents.

Nowadays, most interaction between students and professors is carried out by means of emails. According to Crystal (2006), emails include an obligatory element (obviously, the message) and two optional elements: greeting (or opening) and farewell (or closing). Previous research (e.g., Bou-Franch, 2011; Félix-Brasdefer, 2012) has examined openings and closings in emails, but, to our knowledge, research on these two moves in follow-up emails is scarce.

In the university context, much of the communication between students and professors takes place via emails. Despite the fact that there is a power asymmetry in this relationship, on many occasions professors receive requestive emails which may sound too direct or informal. In this study, Codina-Espurz and Salazar-Campillo explore whether there is a relationship between the language in which the emails were written (Spanish, Catalan and English) and the degree of (in)directness by examining the request strategy and the internal modification employed to soften the imposition of the request.

Email communication is pervasive in faculty interaction. As there exists status imbalance between students and professors in this type of context, emails are expected to cater for the uneven power relationships by means of using appropriate polite features. Previous research (e.g., Eslami, 2013; Salazar-Campillo & Codina-Espurz, in press) has pointed out the pragmatically deficient use of openings and closings in requestive emails sent by non-native students in educational contexts, revealing a lack of the expected deference and respect to the professor.

The present volume, is a timely contribution to the field of interlanguage pragmatics. The nine chapters presented here expand the scope of research to date by including different contexts (i.e., formal instruction, stay-abroad, and online) and age groups which have received less attention (for example, young learners and adolescents). While the speech act of requesting is the one that has been most explored in the field of interlanguage pragmatics, as attested by several chapters in the present volume, disagreements and directives are also tackled.