Teaching email politeness in the EFL/ESL classroom

1. Introduction

1.1. The politeness for linguistic students in email writing is always been a big problem.

1.2. To communicate properly and clearly need high writing skills.

1.3. L2 learners do not have enough pragmatic ability.

1.4. Programatic failure cannot be easily recognized.

1.5. Email politeness is crucial and difficult for L2 learners, because they are lack on writing complex sentences and choosing proper vocabularies.

1.6. The research will point out the possible negative influences of the EFL emails by underlying clear instructions and discuss the researches of perceptions.

2. Previous Research

2.1. The previous research found out that L2 learners prefer use direct request in the email communication. They also lack on modify sentence.

2.2. The method to address the email receivers is not easy for non native speakers.

2.3. Numbers researches analyzed that the problem of making unintentional impoliteness in formal email communication for NNS students is very crucial.

2.3.1. For example, wrong time distription

2.3.2. Inappropriate expression on student's needs and wants

2.4. Hendriks (2010) make a big contribution on this area, he found that inappropriate sentences and words used by non native speakers are sending negative but unintentional messages to receivers.

2.4.1. Not enough status-congruent language

3. The Study: data and participants

3.1. The study on Greek-Gypriot tertiary education students wants to found out the reason why that inappropriate emails could cause unintentionally impoliteness.

3.2. Method: divide the level of politeness to five levels. (1=not at all, 5=very much).

4. Results

4.1. Email 1: significantly more polite. Same as 5 and 6

4.1.1. seemed as impoliteness on "please+imperative"

4.2. Email 2 was the most impoliteness email

4.2.1. Did not include salutation, greeting, syntactic mitigation, closing...

4.2.2. seemed as impoliteness on "please+imperative"

4.3. Email 3 were found little more polite than email 2, but not good as email 5 and 6. Same as 4.

4.3.1. No lexical mitigators, not enough detail explanation

4.4. Email 4 were found little more polite than email 2, but not good as email 5 and 6. Same as 3.

4.4.1. seemed as impoliteness on "please+imperative"

4.5. Email 5: significantly more polite. Same as 1 and 6

4.5.1. include "Thanks" or "Thank you"

4.6. Email 6: significantly more polite. Same as 5 and 1

4.6.1. include "Thanks" or "Thank you"

4.6.2. seemed as impoliteness on "please+imperative"

4.7. The author also showed lots of opinions from native English speakers on the level of politeness on these emails. For example, one person think use "dear" is not appropriate, it better to be replaced by "hi" or "hello".

5. Pedagogical Recommendations and Conclusion

5.1. The study conduct in the British native speakers, the result might be different in other countries.

5.2. The study shows English writing skills is a very important tool to show the level of politeness, however, too much mitigation may not appropriate as well.

5.3. Language is a tool for people express themselves, teacher's should be focus on educate students how to use it to express themselves properly and formally.

5.4. The future teaching process could help non English native speakers avoid unintentionally impoliteness in the formal situation.