Politeness of Vietnamese Students in Writing Request Email in English: a Course-based and Socio-pragmatic Study

Abstract

This exploratory study investigates politeness strategies employed by Vietnamese EFL learners when writing English request emails sent to foreign and Vietnamese professors and school staff. A corpus-based critical discourse analysis is used to analyze sub-elements of politeness including the degree of imposition, terms of address, request-giving strategy and lexicon-syntactic modifier. The results support the assumption that Vietnamese language pragmatic knowledge is deeply ingrained and has tremendous influence on students’ L2 email writing skills. The study also reveals that Vietnamese students applied a high level of imposition with formal term of address and salutation, directness strategies with the overuse of “please” and other hedges. While gender is not a determining factor, the inflexible adoption of fixed phrases and syntactic-lexical devices were attributed to the lack of sociopragmatic competence. Thus, apart from linguistic knowledge, the role of cultural awareness and socio-pragmatic knowledge should be highlighted in communicative English learning and teaching.

Facework in teacher-student email interactions

“…Furthermore, the findings suggest that cultural specificities governing the backgrounds of both the teacher and the students did not seem to have any direct effect on face(work) as analyzed, which goes against Pham & Yeh's (2020) findings that show that Vietnamese language pragmatic knowledge is deeply ingrained and has tremendous influence on students' English email writing skills. The interaction in this paper revolves around face needs as related to the rights and obligations within the norms of the university.…”

Gender in Low-Imposition Email Requests

“…In an Iranian context, Tajeddin and Malmir (2014) did not find any impact of gender on the production of different speech acts by EFL learners. More recently, Pham and Yeh (2020) claim that, in their study with Vietnamese students, females tend to use more conventionally indirect strategies whereas males favour indirect forms and imperatives.…”

Gender Differences in Politeness Strategies in Negotiations in Sharktank America and Sharktank Vietnam: A Contrastive Analysis

“…In Vietnam, several studies showing variations in politeness by gender have been conducted on the relationship between context and language use, such as gender and politeness in family conversations in Hanoi (Vu, T. T. H., 1999), (Chew, G. C. L., 2011), (Ton, T. N., 2022); Vietnamese greetings in Mekong Delta (Nguyen, D. T., & Le Khac, C., 2021), politeness in request emails written by Vietnamese students in Pham, T. M. T., & Yeh, A. (2020).…”