Examining Politeness Strategies in EFL Students-Teachers’ Emails

Abstract

The present dissertation investigates politeness strategies employed in students-teachers’ email discussions. Email application is extensively adopted in the educational sector which raises interest to comprehend the key linguistic features required to perform polite email writing. Initially, this work endeavors to extract the type of politeness strategies English Foreign language learners undertake to email their educators. Besides, the research targets to raise the students’ awareness towards the use of politeness strategies when addressing their teachers in a more formal manner. On this basis, the current research makes use of descriptive approach that comprises quantitative and qualitative tools. To fulfill this goal, a questionnaire was directed to Master One students (N=56), at the Department of English, University of 8 Mai 1945, Guelma. In addition, the students’ written emails (N=24) to their teacher were analyzed with the text corpus analysis approach. To this end, the compiled data confirm the hypothesis that implies students’ unawareness of politeness strategies’ use affect email discussion with their teachers. The findings revealed that the students employ regularly positive politeness strategies which are less respectful, in addition to implementing direct language that expresses high level of imposition and impoliteness resulting in informal emails.