Abstract:
Politeness plays an important role in initiated e-mail requests sent from students to faculty. One such feature of requests susceptible to politeness is the degree of imposition, which is one of the important variables in speech act production. Although the literature on requests is abundant, there are few studies on low- and high-imposition requests, in general, and on Iranian L2 learners’ low- and high-imposition requests, in particular. Through analyzing L2 learners’ requests, this study was an attempt to explore the distribution of pragmalinguistic means when writing English e-mail requests with low- and high degrees of imposition. For the purpose of this study, a corpus of 208 e-mail requests was collected for a rigorous qualitative analysis. The e-requests were classified into 4 categories: information, validation, feedback, and action. They were, then, coded and analyzed. It appeared that, though similar in many ways, the distribution of request type, openings, head act strategies, and internal and external modifiers were relatively conditioned by the degree of imposition. The findings can have valuable resources for future studies of potential interlanguage pragmatics studies, which are concerned with L2 learners’ performance and pragmatic competence in L2 learning.
Machine summary:
Pragmalinguistic Variation in L2 Learners’ E-Requests to Faculty: Looking at Degree of Imposition Mahmood Hashemian*1 Maryam Farhang-Ju2 Received: 2020-02-17 | Revised: 2020-03-24 | Accepted: 2020-04-02 Abstract Politeness plays an important role in initiated e-mail requests sent from students to faculty.
Through analyzing L2 learners’ requests, this study was an attempt to explore the distribution of pragmalinguistic means when writing English e-mail requests with low- and high degrees of imposition.
It appeared that, though similar in many ways, the distribution of request type, openings, head act strategies, and internal and external modifiers were relatively conditioned by the degree of im- position.
e. , request for information, request for validation, re- quest for feedback, and request for action) used by Iranian university-level stu- dents when writing English e-mail requests to faculty.
g. , Chang, 2006; Eslami & Mirzaei, 2014; Yuan, 2001) have focused on the differences between oral and written dis- course in the L2, whereas the focus of other studies (Biesenbach-Lucas, 2006, 2007; Chen, 2006; Eslami, 2013; Mohammadi, 2016) has been on how (non)native speakers mitigate their requests in L2 via e-mail.
Moreover, Chejnová (2014) analyzed forms of address, opening and closing formulas, degrees of directness, and amounts of syntactic, lexical, and external modification used in the e-requests of Czech students to faculty.
e. , address terms, greeting, and phatic com- munication) do Iranian university students employ in their e-mails to faculty in low- and high-imposition e-requests?