Formal e-mails (original) (raw)
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Teaching writing plays a crucial role in improving learners’ language competence and mastery. As Walter Grauberg states (1997:213), writing “consolidates and reinforces language learnt orally”. Besides, writing—the core of “correspondence of all kinds”—offers learners “a means of individual and sometimes quite personal expression, which can be changed, revised, refined and kept as a record” (213). My learners are full scholarship learners who would like to pursue a career or apply for a graduate degree overseas. Therefore, they will definitely need to write a formal email while applying for a job/course abroad. Acknowledging the importance of writing in language teaching, this paper focuses on teaching writing a formal email.
Central Asian Journal of Education, 2021
This exploratory study discusses findings pertaining to university students" pragmatic and intercultural communicative competence in the context of Uzbekistan. It begins with a brief review of the research literature related to pragmatics, and its corollary pragmatic success, initially reviewing studies conducted in various contexts in the past several decades. This is followed by a brief overview of university teaching context in Uzbekistan, a methodology for data collection and criteria for participants" selection. The article concludes with a brief discussion of findings and recommendations for further research. In particular, it highlights the necessity for incorporating explicit instruction of formal email writing in a target language at the tertiary level.
EFL Email Writing: a focus on pragmatic transfer
Adquisicion De Segundas Lenguas En El Marco Del Nuevo Milenio Homenaje a La Profesora Maria Del Mar Marti Viano 2013 Isbn 978 84 370 9083 2 Pags 39 56, 2013
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the relevant literature on email writing practices, sociopragmatic principles and pragmatic transfer, while methodological details underlying this research are provided in Section 3. Next, findings from the studies carried out are reported on and discussed in detail in sections 4 and 5, respectively. Finally, conclusions are drawn from the empirical study. 2. Literature review: Email writing and sociopragmatic transfer With technologies continually emerging, developing and expanding, computer-mediated communication has become an increasingly popular means of interaction within the university context. Recent research underlines the centrality of email interaction between students-lecturer which, in many cases, has even replaced face to face communication (Taylor et al., 2011). Students write emails to their lecturers in order to make requests for feedback, for a meeting, a letter of recommendation, or a deadline extension, among others (Knupsky & Nagy-Bell, 2011; Lorenzo-Dus & Bou-Franch, in press). Considering the importance of these transactional goals, their appropriate negotiation is seen as a crucial step for a positive outcome. However, students do not receive sufficient instruction on writing (upward-moving) emails. Research so far has focussed on students' ability to assess the imposition, social distance and power relations necessary to adapt email style but more research is needed in order to evaluate the extent of students' stylistic adaptation in a foreign language (Duthler, 2006; Knupsky & Nagy-Bell, 2011). Of particular importance for the present study is research on (in)formality and (in)directness in email writing. Email communication is often considered as the prime example of the increasing informalisation of discourse, a trend that is favoured by the technological features of
Orality and literacy, formality and informality in email communication
Ibérica: Revista de la …, 2008
"Approaches to the linguistic characteristics of computer-mediated communication (CMC) have highlighted the frequent oral traits involved in electronic mail along with features of written language. But email is today a new communication exchange medium in social, professional and academic settings, frequently used as a substitute for the traditional formal letter. The oral characterizations and linguistic formality involved in this use of emails are still in need of research. This article explores the formal and informal features in emails based on a corpus of messages exchanged by academic institutions and studies the similarities and differences on the basis of their mode of communication (one-to-one or one-to-many) and the sender's mother tongue (native or non-native). The language samples collected were systematically analyzed for formality of greetings and farewells, use of contractions, politeness indicators and non-standard linguistic features. The findings provide new insights into traits of orality and formality in email communication and demonstrate the emergence of a new style in writing for even the most important, confidential and formal purposes which seems to be creating to form a new sub-genre of letter-writing. Keywords: CMC, asynchronous communication, formality, informality, email style"
Writing a Formal Email in English: Exploring university students’ pragmatic competence
2021
This exploratory study discusses findings pertaining to university students‟ pragmatic and intercultural communicative competence in the context of Uzbekistan. It begins with a brief review of the research literature related to pragmatics, and its corollary pragmatic success, initially reviewing studies conducted in various contexts in the past several decades. This is followed by a brief overview of university teaching context in Uzbekistan, a methodology for data collection and criteria for participants‟ selection. The article concludes with a brief discussion of findings and recommendations for further research. In particular, it highlights the necessity for incorporating explicit instruction of formal email writing in a target language at the tertiary level.
Ibérica, 2005
This paper presents the results of a corpus-based study which investigates the genre of academic email and more specifically its pragmatic dimension. Four conversational routines (thank yous, apologies, requests, offers) are analysed and compared in two channels: academic e-mails and conventional print letters. In addition, data from both native and non-native speakers of English is considered, which sheds light on some of the differences found in the academic e-mail writing of learners of English. The findings indicate that academic e-mail is a relatively formal type of correspondence which is still largely influenced, as is to be expected, by the genre of the academic letter, and that as a genre, academic e-mail is in the process of formation or semi-formation. Finally, native speakers of English are found to be more informal than non-native speakers of English in academic e-mails.
Fostering Pragmatic Competence: Strategies and Materials for Email Writing
Whereas graduate English as a second language (ESL) students have been found to use a wide range of appropriate politeness strategies in email, studies have found that emails sent by undergraduate ESL students can be perceived as impolite (Biesenbach-Lucas, 2007). On the contrary, effective use of politeness strategies leads to positive perceptions of students' competence (Bolkan & Holmgren, 2012). Explicit instruction on netiquette guidelines can foster the ability to construct polite email messages. This paper offers a set of strategies and materials devoted to email writing for undergraduate students in ESL settings. The goal of the paper is to promote the development of sociopragmatic competence with a specific focus on electronic requests in academic contexts. In our overview of pedagogical materials and approaches, we draw on current literature regarding teaching pragmatics and on our own extensive experience working with English language learners both in the United States and abroad.
Openings and Closing in Emails by CLIL Students: A Pedagogical Proposal
English Language Teaching
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. In this paper, we firstly explore this topic further by looking at different groups of emails written by CLIL students to ascertain whether this variable affects students’ pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic ability when writing their emails. Secondly, a proposal for the teaching of openings and closings is suggested, which aims to help second and/or foreign language learners behave in a more target-like manner thus avoiding p...
TEACHING FORMAL LETTER WRITING
The article deals with the problems of teaching writing business correspondence in a foreign language to University students. The author of the articles tells about two types of writing. The first is an official letter, the second is an informal letter. In unofficial letters, a writer shows his passion and feelings or just personal information by exchanging content, but a formal letter involves academic and professional settings in both the сontent form and the structure form. In addition, the article analyzes the structure of a letter.