The use of computer-mediated communication including emails has become pervasive in academic contexts as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. What seems to be significant but simply overlooked by students is meeting politeness netiquettes while sending emails. To this end, the current study investigated the extent to which non-native English speaking university students adjust the level of politeness in their response emails written in English to that of the emails received from an American professor. To collect data, four versions of an academic email message with different levels of politeness were prepared in advance. The emails either included or excluded verbal and structural politeness markers and asked for the participants’ demographic information and their reason for participation in the study. Then, 73 university students enrolled in a general English course were selected and divided randomly into four groups each of which received one version of the email message from the professor. The results of the data analysis on the participants’ response emails, based on accommodation theory (Giles 1973) as a theoretical framework, revealed that they did not accommodate either verbal or structural politeness cues in emails. Besides, the participants’ knowledge of the politeness etiquettes in the academic email genre seemed inadequate. Finally, the article provides some pedagogical implications for course designers, materials developers, and instructors to devise some plans to raise students’ awareness of email politeness etiquettes and for students to be aware of the significance of meeting politeness principles in their academic emails.
Abstract-Classroom research mainly concentrates on what happens in classrooms and tries to explore these events. One aspect that has been under investigation in this area is 'classroom interaction'. The current work was inspired by Kumaravadivelu's (2006) classification of interaction types: textual, interpersonal and ideational interaction. The main objective of the present study was to investigate the nature of interaction types proposed by Kumaravadivelu, the extent of their occurrence and their contribution to L2 development regarding two levels of Elementary and Intermediate. During data collection process, 20 sessions of EFL classes in a Language Institute were observed and the main events regarding the types of interaction under investigation were written in the form of field notes and audio-recorded for later reflection. The results were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The quantitative data from the observation were analyzed through inferential statistics. Qualitative analysis of data was carried out through transcription of important events. The quantitative results indicated that the difference between means of time spent on three types of interaction regarding two levels was not significant. For the qualitative analysis, the nature of these three types of interaction was compared based on two levels and some similarities and differences were found. Index Terms-interaction, interaction analysis, textual interaction, interpersonal interaction, ideational interaction
This quasi-experimental study scrutinized the impact of technology-mediated TBLT in an online collaborative and individual EFL learning environment on the development of request production of 20 male and female B.A. students of TEFL. The participants were divided into two equal individual and collaborative experimental groups to receive online video-prompt task-based instruction on request speech act production in six distinct situations defined based on different contextual variables including distance, power, and imposition. Two similar versions of video-prompt Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs) focusing on six situations covered in online classes were given to the participants as a pretest and posttest. The results indicated that both groups’ request speech act production improved significantly after the intervention. However, there was no significant difference between the performance of the two groups. It was then concluded that both techniques are facilitative in boosting students’ pragmatic competence; however, more time is required to find out the extent to which these techniques differ in terms of their productiveness.
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