Abstract
While email communication has received a lot of scholastic attention and its relevance to second language acquisition has been explored to some extent, how Chinese EFL learners write emails for academic purposes remains unknown. Despite a sizable amount of literature on requesting as a speech act and on the acquisition of the speech act in L2, scant discussion has been directed to how email correspondents construct relational identity and individual identities as requesters and requestees. Thus, considering the varied findings concerning the (in) formality of email communication, it might be worthwhile to explore what level of formality characterizes request-making emails written by Chinese EFL graduate students. Also, it may prove beneficial to investigate how the students, in their email requests, construct their personal identity as student requesters and the identity of the international researchers as academic requestees, as well as their relational identity. A sample of 12 request-making emails written by 12 Chinese EFL graduate students to appointed hypothetical international researchers were collected as the data, together with the results of informal interviews with three students. Through qualitative analysis, the researcher found that (i) the students’ emails were basically formal; (ii) the students constructed a deferent relational identity with the international researchers; and (iii) they identified themselves as reasonable requesters and their addressees as appropriate requestees. The learner writers’ use of basically formal style might be explicable in terms of culturally biased identity awareness.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2006. Introduction: Sociolinguistics and computer-mediated communication. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(4): 419–438.
Bachman, Lyle. 1990. Fundamental considerations in language testing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M.M. Bakhtin (trans: Emerson, C. and Holquist, M.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Baron, Naomi. 1998. Letters by phone or speech by any other means: The linguistics of email. Language & Communication 18: 133–170.
Baron, Naomi. 2001. Put on a public face. New York Times (April 11).
Biesenbach-Lucas, Sigrun. 2006. Making request in email: Do cyber-consultations entail directness? Toward conventions in a new medium. In Pragmatics and language learning, eds. Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen, et al. Honolulu, HI.: Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center, University of Hawai’i.
Biesenbach-Lucas, Sigrun. 2007. Students writing emails to faculty: An examination of E-politeness. Language Learning & Technology 11(2): 59–81.
Bjorge, Anne. 2007. Power distance in English lingua franca email communication. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 17(1): 60–80.
Bloch, Joel. 2002. Student/teacher interaction via email: The social context of Internet discourse. Journal of Second Language Writing 11: 117–134.
Bou-Franch, Patricia. 2011. Openings and closings in Spanish email conversations. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 1772–1785.
Brown, Penelope, and Stepehen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bunz, Ulla, and Scott Campbell. 2002. Accommodating politeness indicators in personal electronic mail messages. Paper presented at the association of internet researcher’s 3rd annual conference, October 13–16, 2002, in Maastricht, The Netherlands. http://bunz.comm.fsu.edu/AoIR2002politeness.pdf.
Chen, Chi-fen. 2006. The development of e-mail literacy: From writing to peers to writing to authority figures. Language Learning & Technology 10(2): 35–55.
Chen, Xinren. 2004. On pragmatic balance. Journal of Foreign Language Studies 6: 42–47.
Chen, Xinren. 2009. A new coursebook in pragmatics. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.
Chen, Xinren. 2013a. Politeness theories and English learning. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.
Chen, Xinren. 2013b. Identity and communication: The pragmatic perspective. Beijing: Higher Education Press.
Collot, Milena, and Nancy Belmore. 1996. Electronic language: A new variety of English. In Computer-mediated communication: Linguistic, social and cross-cultural perspectives, ed. Susan Herring, 13–28. Amsterdam: John Banjamins.
Crystal, David. 2001. Language and the internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Duthler, Kirk. 2006. The politeness of requests made via email and voicemail: Support for the hyperpersonal model. Journal of Computer-mediated Communication 11(2): 500–521.
Economidou-Kogetsidis, Maria. 2010. Cross-cultural and situational variation in requesting behavior: Perceptions of social situations and strategic usage of request patterns. Journal of Pragmatics 42: 2262–2281.
Ferrara, Kathleen, Hans Brunner, and Greg Whittemore. 1991. Interactive written discourse as an emergent register. Written Communication 8(1): 8–34.
Gu, Yueguo. 1990. Politeness phenomena in modern Chinese. Journal of Pragmatics 14: 237–257.
Herring, Susan. 1996. Two variants of an electronic message schema. In Computer-mediated communication: Linguistic, social and cross-cultural perspectives, ed. Susan Herring, 81–106. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Herring, Susan. 2004. Computer-mediated discourse analysis: An approach to researching online communities. In Designing for virtual communities in the service of learning, ed. Sasha Barab, Rob Kling, and James Gray, 338–376. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Herring, Susan. 2007. A faceted classification scheme for computer-mediated discourse. Language@internet 4. http://www.languageatinternet.de/articles/2007/761/index_html/.
Kiesler, Sara, Jane Siegel, and Timothy W. McGuire. 1987. Social psychological aspects of computer-mediated communication. In Information technology: Social issues. A reader, eds. Ruth Finnegan, Graeme Salaman and Kenneth Thompson, 247–262. Seven Oaks: Hodder and Stoughton (in association with the Open University).
Lee-Wong, Song Mei. 2000. Politeness and face in Chinese culture. Bern: Peter Lang.
Lin, Yuh-Huey. 2009. Query preparatory modals: Cross-linguistic and cross-situational variations in request modification. Journal of Pragmatics 41: 1636–1656.
Mantovani, Giuseppe. 1994. Is computer-mediated communication intrinsically apt to enhance democracy in organizations? Human Relations 47(1): 45–59.
Moran, Charles, and Gaffe Hawisher. 1998. The rhetoric and languages of electronic mail. In Page to screen: Taking literacy into the electronic age, ed. Ilana Synder, 80–101. London: Routledge.
Mulholland, Joan. 1999. Email: Uses, issues and problems in an institutional setting. In Writing business: Genres, media, and discourse, ed. Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini, and Catherine Nickerson, 57–84. New York: Longman.
Nie, Norman, and Lutz Erbring. 2000. Internet society. Pala alto: Stanford institute for the quantitative study of society [Online]. http://www.standford.edu/group/siqss/Press_Release/Preliminary_Report-4-21.pdf. Accessed 30 July 2001.
Sproull, Lee, and Sara Kiesler. 1991. Connections: New ways of working in networked organizations. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Taguchi, Nako. 2011. Teaching pragmatics: Trends and issues. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 31: 289–310.
Tracy, Karen. 2002. Everyday talk: Building and reflecting identities. London: The Guilford Press.
Waldvogel, Joan. 2001. Email and workplace communication: A literature review. Language in the Workplace: Occasional Papers 3: 1–12.
Waldvogel, Joan. 2007. Greetings and closings in workplace email. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12(2): 456–477.
Yang, Xianjue. 2009. Pragmatic development in a second language: A cross-sectional study on the acquisition of English requests by Chinese learners. Beijing: National Defense Industry Press.
Yates, Simeon. 1996. Oral and written linguistic aspects of computer conferencing: A corpus based study. In Computer-mediated communication: Linguistic, social and cross-cultural perspectives, ed. Susan Herring, 29–46. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Yus, Francisco. 2011. Cyberpragmatics: Internet-mediated communication in context. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Zimmerman, Eric, and Judit Bar-llan. 2009. PIM @ academia: How e-mail is used by scholars. Online Information Review 33(1): 22–42.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Chen, X. (2016). Emailing Requests to International Researchers: The Construction of Identity by Chinese EFL Graduate Students. In: Chen, Ys., Rau, DH., Rau, G. (eds) Email Discourse Among Chinese Using English as a Lingua Franca. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-888-5_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-888-5_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-287-887-8
Online ISBN: 978-981-287-888-5
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)