A study of email communication by EFL learners: a pragmatics perspective

Abstract

The present report is a self-investigation conformed by 6 students of Linguistics and English Literature, considering major pragmatic aspects. This study presents an exploratory nature, being a self-study with the objective of describing the changes and characteristics of email communication by EFL learners through a pragmatic perspective. The study considered speech acts and politeness in 82 emails written in English between the beginning of 2017 and mid of 2021, being 4.5 years of data. In order to achieve a successful analysis, the data was converted into numbers that represented certain changes between the strategies that students used when writing their emails. The analysis was divided into four major aspects to consider: Head Acts, the Modifiers presented in the structure, the Politeness degree of the emails, and how these were changing through time. In terms of Head Acts, it was concluded that representatives and directives were the most employed; in addition, we concluded that the structure of emails presented most of the time was simple, a phenomenon that could be related to the type of speech act present in the email and insecurities of students when writing in English. When speaking of politeness orientation, we concluded that there is a balance between the three politeness instances studied, with the exception of the year 2021, which demonstrated a higher tendency to negative politeness. Finally, there were changes through these categories which led us to conclude that certain scenarios and situations -such as context, lack of instruction and experience- made the writing of students change through time. This makes us believe that there should be more involvement of teachers and the academic program itself in the email writing process, as well as in the implementation of instances where students have the possibility to develop their pragmatic competences.