The Inbox ; Understanding and Maximizing Student-Instructor E-mail; Jennifer Ewald

Jennifer Ewald [+–]

Saint Joseph’s University

Jennifer D. Ewald is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, PA, where she teaches undergraduate courses at all levels of instruction. She has published in the areas of applied linguistics, pragmatics, and second language pedagogy.

E-mail is a common medium of communication in academic settings, and its informal nature has given rise to unique discourse strategies that can advantageously combine the norms of oral and written language. Unfortunately, e-mail is also a potential source of misunderstanding. Some teachers, annoyed by the informalities that characterize this discourse context, interpret students’ messages as demanding, impolite, or unprofessional. For many students, however, e-mail is outdated, and some use it only in the university context, opting to text, facebook, or tweet their family and friends. This book provides a detailed analysis of 1,403 e-mail messages sent by 338 university students to a professor of Spanish and linguistics. This research has several goals: to analyze features of students’ messages that reveal their beliefs about the norms for student-teacher e-mail exchanges; to explore the effective incorporation of the conventions of both oral and written language in this particular discourse context; to identify patterns or rhetorical strategies used by students in e-mail to perform certain pragmatic functions, such as making a request, offering an excuse, expressing gratitude, apologizing and complaining; and, to identify students’ choice of language for e-mails to their teacher and the pragmatic functions for which they chose to write in their first or second languages. Each of the chapters specifically addresses several pedagogical implications and identifies areas for additional investigation.

Student-Teacher E-mail: An Introduction [+–] 1-9

This chapter provides a brief introduction to the use of e-mail in university contexts and introduces related issues that complicate student-teacher e-mail communication. Additionally, by reviewing previous research on student e-mail, this chapter highlights the fact that faculty often criticize how students use e-mail in terms of both form (e.g., abbreviations, spelling, perceived lack of politeness, etc.) and content (request strategies, absence excuse patterns, etc.). This chapter also explores characteristics of student e-mail that reveal its spoken-written hybrid nature as a form of discourse. Finally, this chapter also points to several issues specifically relevant to students’ choice of language when e-mailing foreign/second language teachers.

The Present Study: Research Design [+–] 10-17

This chapter outlines particular methodological issues underlying the present study. It describes the important role of the Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Subjects in Research in e-mail research, the data collection process, the particular participants and context involved in this study, including the number of actual e-mail messages under investigation, and the methods of data analysis used to investigate these student e-mails. This chapter also addresses advantages and disadvantages involved in analyzing natural versus elicited data.

E-mail Communication: Student Beliefs and Conventions [+–] 18-40

This chapter encourages the reader to try to understand the student perspective by highlighting a number of specific e-mail messages and analyzing the student beliefs that might motivate them. This chapter reports in detail specific faculty complaints and concerns about student e-mail and considers the practice of teaching students how to use e-mail appropriately and effectively with faculty. The analysis confirms that though the form of students’ e-mails may reveal beliefs and practices different from those of faculty, many students do indeed understand and appreciate the existence of e-mail etiquette. Moreover, this chapter identifies several student conventions in e-mail. This section closes with an overall report on the functions for which students in this study chose to use e-mail including requests, excuses, expressions of gratitude and complaints, as well as other related topics such as the dropbox feature and their choice of e-mail language.

Students’ Use of the Dropbox [+–] 41-56

This chapter highlights students’ use of e-mail as a kind of asynchronous electronic dropbox through which they submit assignments that would otherwise be submitted in real time in person to their teacher. Messages specifically coded as dropbox examples are analyzed for e-mail characteristics previously explored in recent studies: forms of address and openings, preclosings and closings, opening/closing combinations, subject lines, and pragmatic functions. This chapter, like all subsequent chapters, closes with a description of related pedagogical implications and areas for future research.

Requests [+–] 57-70

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of all student e-mails categorized as requests. This analysis focuses on identifying the actual requests (i.e., request topics) students made by e-mail as well as how students expressed those needs. The analysis highlights several common lexical items students used, often more than once, in their requests (e.g., I was wondering and just) as well as their accompanying expressions of gratitude and apology (e.g., I really appreciate/I would be grateful if and I am sorry/I apologize), and their relatively sparse use of please. These lexical items are explored as markers of politeness. This chapter concludes with specific pedagogical implications and areas of future research related to student e-mail requests.

Repair Work: Apologies [+–] 71-84

This chapter is the first of two related chapters on repair work. Chapter Six focuses specifically on apologies and Chapter Seven on excuses, both examples of types of repair. Apologies are analyzed in Chapter Six in light of the notion of ‘face’. Previous work on apologies (Olshtain & Cohen, 1983) frames the analysis of these students’ e-mail apologies. Accordingly, students’ actual expressions of apology, explanations of their own situations, acknowledgements of responsibility, offers of repair and promises of forbearance are explored in detail. Meier’s (1997) three supercategories are compared with Olshtain & Cohen’s (1983) five formulas in the context of student e-mail repair work. This chapter closes with specific pedagogical implications and areas of future research related to apologies.

Repair Work: Excuses [+–] 85-102

Chapter Seven is the second half of the present overall analysis of repair work. Following Chapter Six’s focus on apologies, Chapter Seven explores students’ excuse e-mails, particularly in regard to absence excuses. Cross-cultural considerations are noted in the context of absence excuses. Overlap between apologies and absence excuses are identified but several characteristics unique to absence excuses are highlighted in this analysis. Previous research, specifically Hong (2008), is used to categorize students’ e-mail absence accounts as related to personal, professional, and medical reasons. This chapter concludes with specific pedagogical implications and areas of future research related to excuses.

Expressions of Gratitude [+–] 103-113

This chapter explores students’ e-mail expressions of gratitude, highlighting them as a perhaps surprisingly complex task for students. Students’ e-mail thank yous are categorized according to their respective topic (e.g., teacher providing help, sending homework assignment, writing a letter of recommendation, etc.). The report includes an analysis of students’ actual thanking expressions including an emphasis on each thanking category (Cheng, 2010) and frequency of expression. A more general e-mail characteristic is also analyzed in this chapter: students’ self-identification. This chapter closes with specific pedagogical implications and areas of future research related to expressions of gratitude.

Complaints [+–] 114-127

This chapter analyzes these students’ least frequent use of e-mail: complaining. The analysis begins with a description of previous work on complaints (Olshtain & Weinbach, 1987) and reports on other complaint studies carried out in both naturalistic and laboratory settings. The analysis of the present data reports on the actual topics of students’ complaints, grades being the most common, and applies Laforest’s (2002) previously-recognized complaint patterns to explore these students’ complaint e-mails including related areas such as mitigated and intensified complaints and arguments. To explore these patterns, this chapter makes uses of a series of particular e-mail exchanges with a student. This chapter concludes with specific pedagogical implications and areas of future research related to complaints.

Student Use of L1/L2 [+–] 128-139

This chapter provides an analysis of students’ choice of language when e-mailing their foreign/second language (Spanish) teacher. Current pedagogical emphasis on maximizing the use of students’ second language and minimizing, or excluding, their use of their first or native language is described in light of these students’ e-mails. Students’ actual messages are analyzed in terms of the language(s) in which they were composed; these findings are reported in terms of students’ Spanish course level and the function(s) for which they were written. Students’ use of humour in their second language and their perspectives on e-mail language choice are also considered. Related pedagogical implications and areas of future research are also included.

Where to go from here [+–] 140-141

This brief chapter concludes this book by noting clear limitations of the present study, summarizing a few general conclusions and pointing to areas of research that future investigations might consider given the changing nature of e-mail and other forms of electronic communication that are increasing in popularity.

End Matter

References [+–] 142-149

Index [+–] 150

Reviews

This book serves as an excellent aid in recognizing and elaborating on the patterns found within email communication between students and instructors. It is beneficial to linguists and the academic field as it enhances knowledge concerning the discourse strategies used by students. The author does an excellent job of presenting her collected natural data, analyzing the different function categories, identifying patterns and offering explanations. ..This book would be beneficial in university pedagogy courses that educate young and aspiring instructors to become more knowledgeable, insightful and effective. The contents of this book can easily be understood, and is pertinent in particular to foreign language instructors.
LinguistList, October 2016

The Inbox addresses an important gap in research in pragmatics and technology-mediated discourse, and the findings will serve as an important baseline for comparison with future studies. Ewald identifies several crucial directions for research that would shed further light on patterns of student/facultycommunication outside of class using email and other technologies.
Language Learning & Technology, 20.1 (2016)

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The Inbox

Understanding and Maximizing Student-Instructor E-mail

Jennifer Ewald [+–]

Saint Joseph’s University

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