Negotiating Personal Relationship Through Email Terms of Address

Rau, D. Victoria; Rau, Gerald

doi:10.1007/978-981-287-888-5_2

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 13 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…It is reasonable to conjecture that the use of formulaic endings could be the outcome of cultural influences: certainly this practice has been found elsewhere among Chinese learners (see e.g. Rau & Rau, 2016). The main point here, though, as seen in the discussion of definite article use in 4.2, is that this practice needs to be addressed more closely in this kind of writing because of its impact on the dialogue, i.e.…”

Section: Please Get Back To Us and Tell Us What Will Be Your Decisionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Bringing reality to the classroom: Exercises in intertextuality

Bremner

Costley

2018

English for Specific Purposes

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The ability to handle intertextual relations in email is an important component of workplace writing competence that is, for the most part, overlooked in business English classes because of a tendency to treat emails in classroom contexts as independent texts. This study reports on a series of email assignments that required students to read and process a collection of texts before composing emails themselves, with the aim of examining how students dealt with the demands made by the intertextual nature of workplace writing. The findings suggest that the management of multiple texts and their intertextual relations poses considerable challenges for student writers, specifically relating to the amount of information to include, the degree of explicitness needed in referring to other texts, and the management of the dialogue and writer-reader relationship. The study concludes that there is a need to demonstrate to students the centrality of intertextuality and the ways in which it contributes to the coherence of workplace communication. Students need to understand, too, that managing intertextuality is not simply a question of textual manipulation, but of understanding the communicative context and of considering how they want their relationship with the reader to develop.

show abstract

Section: Please Get Back To Us and Tell Us What Will Be Your Decisionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Bringing reality to the classroom: Exercises in intertextuality

Bremner

Costley

2018

English for Specific Purposes

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…It would be expected that through socialization into institutional email culture, over time L2 students may improve their email etiquette in the TL. However, Rau and Rau (2016) observed limited progress by a group of Taiwanese EFL graduate students when writing emails to their NS instructor. It was found that throughout the 12-week course the majority of the students employed the same formal forms of address when communicating with the instructor, and resorted to formulaic closings without any changes, thus displaying little evidence of negotiation of personal relationship with the instructor over time.…”

Section: Pragmatics Of Email Requests In Student-faculty Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite her progress, however, Ling's email practices demonstrated constant struggle with language use in order to achieve her communicative goals while maintaining status-congruent politeness. Similarly to Rau and Rau (2016), Chen (2006) points out that the development of L2 email literacy is not an easy process because culture-specific appropriateness rules are tacit, and many of the challenges that Ling faced earlier in her course of study were due to the absence of explicit models for her to learn from. The author therefore advocated that email instruction be provided to help L2 learners communicate successfully with higher-ups in emails.…”

Section: Pragmatics Of Email Requests In Student-faculty Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pragmatic development in the instructed context

Nguyen

2022

PRAG

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article reports an eight-month investigation into the long-term impact of explicit instruction on the learnability of different aspects of email requests by a group of Vietnamese university students. Two intact classes were randomly assigned to the treatment (N = 13) and control conditions (N = 19). Over a four-week period, the treatment group received six hours of instruction which comprised consciousness-raising, meta-pragmatic explanation, repeated output practice and teacher feedback. The control group, on the other hand, only followed the usual syllabus. Results of the study indicate that the treatment group obtained significantly greater pre-to-posttest gains than the control group, and that their improvement was retained by the time of the eight-month delayed post-test. Despite the learners’ overall progress, however, it was also found that different aspects of their performance appeared to respond differently to instruction. The article supports the need for instruction of email politeness and discusses implications for future pedagogy and research.

show abstract

“…Levy and Murphy (2006) believe that some words can be added to minimize an imposition and the accompanying illocutionary force, such as "If you have the time, could you send me a copy?" Regarding terms of Arab World English Journal www.awej.org ISSN: 2229-9327 342 address, Rau and Rau (2016) believe that these are considered a move of politeness. The findings showed that students of both cultural backgrounds used the addressing term "Dear" in their emails, which is consistent with students' general practice when they need to discuss such sensitive issues as a higher grade.…”

Section: Qualitative Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The findings showed that students of both cultural backgrounds used the addressing term "Dear" in their emails, which is consistent with students' general practice when they need to discuss such sensitive issues as a higher grade. Rau and Rau (2016) argue that the use of a particular term of address depends on different factors or modes of communication.…”

Section: Qualitative Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negotiation and Impoliteness Strategies in Saudi and Australian Postgraduate Students’ Emails

Alsharif

Alyousef

2017

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Although negotiation via email takes place every day between students and their supervisors/lecturers, the processes underlying these negotiations have been largely neglected in research to date. Further, there is a need to investigate the linguistic email communication problems that Saudis encounter when they study abroad. This study aims to identify the dominant features of email communication of twenty Saudi and Australian post-graduate students with their lecturers. The research sought to understand the following: to what extent negotiation moves differ from one group to another; if there is a significant difference between the two raters when rating native speakers (NS) versus non-native speakers (NNS); whether there is a significant relationship between students’ scores and total number of words used in negotiation moves; the most important moves that might have affected the raters’ decisions when giving the highest scores versus the lowest scores; and whether there is difference between total scores of NS and NNS. Whereas the qualitative analysis employed (im)politeness as the theoretical framework, the quantitative analysis focused on the moves used by students in terms of context, proposal, justification, options, and requests. It was found that NS and NNS had similar likelihoods of gaining higher grades when using more details. When both NS and NNS failed to employ a focus-on-context move, they were likely to fail in their negotiations. International students need to be encouraged to give more detailed explanations to improve their negotiation techniques. Pedagogical implications include greater insights into the appropriate use of email negotiation strategies between students and their lecturers.

show abstract

Negotiating Personal Relationship Through Email Terms of Address

Cited by 12 publications

References 13 publications

Bringing reality to the classroom: Exercises in intertextuality

Bringing reality to the classroom: Exercises in intertextuality

Pragmatic development in the instructed context

Negotiation and Impoliteness Strategies in Saudi and Australian Postgraduate Students’ Emails

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About