The Inbox - Understanding and Maximizing Student-Instructor E-mail - Jennifer Ewald
Students’ Use of the Dropbox
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.
Description
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.