Teachers’ and students' perception of e-mail politeness in academic cyber-consultation: Implications for teaching pragmatics.

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. Our results partially confirm previous research findings (Economidou-Kogetsidis 2011; Félix-Brasdefer 2012). As for perception of e-mail request politeness, it was observed that students’ perception of appropriateness was significantly higher than teachers’. These results entail pedagogical implications in the field of pragmatic instruction, mainly the need to include individual variation in e-mail literacy training