Putting Research into Practice: Beyond Textbook Email Task Design for Pre-experience Business English Learners

Abstract

Keywords

Email pre-experience learners business English multi-communication high proficiency Middle East

Introduction

One of the consequences of the digital era has been the undeniable rise in the use of English in business. Studies have shown that large numbers of people in the business community now rely on English in order to get their work done, and at the same time, that many business transactions now take place through digital technologies in the form of computer mediated communication (CMC). More specifically, many of the business transactions that take place are facilitated through the genre of email and through email in English (Evans, 2010). Moreover, while many textbooks now include materials that are designed to help learners to develop the skills that they need to communicate well using email, several recent studies have also indicated that the types of email that real business people produce and the skills they need to do so, are not included in most commercially available materials (e.g. Bremner, 2008; Bremner, 2010; Evans, 2012). Furthermore, recent research into CMC in the workplace has identified other skills that are needed in communicating effectively through the medium of email that are generally not covered in textbook materials, such as the ability to create a shared sense of purpose and identity, the ability to understand different audiences and accommodate them in different messages, and the ability to recognize and create inter-linkages between email and spoken communication in the form of intertextuality or interdiscursivity (Nickerson, 2018; Nickerson and Planken, 2016; Bremner and Costley, 2018; Darics and Gatti, 2019; Gimenez, 2014; Zhang, 2013). In this study, we will be discussing a recent project carried out with high-proficiency learners of business English located in the UAE with little or no previous knowledge of business, which aimed to help them develop the CMC skills they will need to succeed in the contemporary UAE workplace, with specific reference to email. In doing so, the study went beyond what is normally included within the textbook and attempted to place our learners in a writing space more similar to that of the modern business context.

In the account which follows, we will show how we familiarized our learners with the skills that people need to write effective business emails and then provided them with opportunities to develop their own appropriate skills. This included the development of a pre-test to raise their awareness of what it means to write effectively, e.g. appropriate use of the medium, message content, and message packaging. Finally, we constructed a series of self-reflexive tasks to facilitate and support the development of our learners’ own communication skills, not only for our course, but also for other forms of digitally-based writing in the future. We will show how we focussed on the skills that previous studies in ESP have suggested our learners will need to be successful email writers once they enter the workforce. We will illustrate our discussion with reference to the materials that we developed and the language support we provided, including what we learned from the learners’ response and the challenges we faced in moving beyond the boundaries of the textbook.

Our study first provides a review of the literature of relevance for the use of business English for professional purposes in the digital era, which helped us in creating our course. It looks in detail at what we know about business email as a genre from scholarship in the ESP discipline, and also at the skills that previous research has identified as being necessary in order to use email, and other forms of digital communication, effectively within the business context. At the same time, we will outline some of the recent work that has provided insights into how such skills can be introduced into the classroom in an appropriate way, as well as how to ensure that real learning is taking place. We then continue by giving details about our approach, and the decisions we took in designing a set of materials for our learners to raise their awareness of email and to reflect on the skills that they need to become an effective digital writer, and we conclude our account with our own experience in engaging with the project as well as that of our learners. Our intention is to provide some ideas for other practitioners on how to incorporate the skills underlying business email in English into the classroom in an effective way as part of an appropriate learning experience.

Previous Studies

In a recent study on digital communication, Darics and Gatti (2019) highlight the impact that advances in information and communication technologies have had on workplace practices and observe that ‘Digital communication technologies led to a revolution in how people interact at work: relying on computer-mediated communication technologies is now a must, rather than an alternative’ (Darics and Gatti, 2019: 237). Their study deconstructs the nature of the skills that people now need to interact successfully through digital media, and this allows them to conclude that effective writers are those who generate a shared sense of purpose in their (digital) communication, creating a relationship between themselves and the recipient of the communication. At the same time, in successful digital interactions, they note that there is a shared sense of identity, a collegial atmosphere within the text, and the mutual understanding that the communication is intended to lead to an effective collaboration between all of the parties involved. While some of these characteristics have also been observed previously in other forms of business discourse, notably in negotiations (e.g. Planken, 2005) and in multicultural business meetings (e.g. Poncini, 2004; Handford, 2010), this more recent study is a clear indication that the management of rapport that Spencer-Oatey (2000) has observed in successful intercultural interactions is also a crucial component in digital communication. Given that many business people now conduct business across both cultural and linguistic lines, it seems plausible that understanding how to collaborate and create a shared sense of purpose should also be included in instructional materials on business email.

In addition to Darics and Gatti’s observations on the nature of successful digital communication, Gimenez (2014) also provides important insights into the skills business people need to develop that are specific to CMC. He notes, ‘The workplace has become a complex communicative space where the demand for “doing more in less time” seems to be the prevailing norm. To respond to such a demand, people have been resorting to multi-communication (MC), that is, holding multiple, face-to-face and electronically mediated conversations at the same time. In business contexts, people may, for example, write an email and/or a text on instant messaging (IM), while speaking to a customer or colleague on the telephone’ (Gimenez, 2014: 1). Gimenez (2014) studied four multinational companies in London in the United Kingdom engaged in telecommunications, banking, marketing and management consultancy, and investigated their multi-communication. This involved situations where business people were compelled to hold ‘multiple conversations at the same time’ (2014: 1) in order to complete their business transactions. Gimenez concludes that people frequently conducted two to three simultaneous ‘conversations’, most of which were in a digital form, and also that there was an underlying set of skills in using CMC that contributed to the success of the message, such as understanding how to use different media simultaneously (media packaging) and being able to evaluate different audiences (audience profiling) (Gimenez, 2014; Nickerson and Planken, 2016). Gimenez’s study was a pioneering attempt to understand how digital media underpins workplace interactions, and it revealed a battery of interactional skills that business people need that go far beyond effectively producing the surface features of a text. As Nickerson (2018) contends, it is particularly important for pre-experience learners, i.e. those learners with no prior knowledge of the business world, to develop these skills in the same way that they need to develop or maintain their skills in language proficiency.

While studies like those of Darics and Gatti (2019) and Gimenez (2014) have looked at the underlying skills that are needed in successfully engaging with digital communication in general, others have looked specifically at the nature of email messages. Over the course of the last two decades, for instance, several studies within the ESP discipline have focussed on the business email (Nickerson, 2000; Bremner and Costley, 2018; Cheng and Mok, 2008; Gains, 1999; Louhiala-Salminen, 2002; Warren, 2013). These have established, for instance, that writers routinely use specialized lexical items to collaborate with each other in intra-corporate email (Nickerson, 2000), that email is a hybrid genre that combines the characteristics of spoken and written discourse in multinational business, often in a network of multilingual transactions (Louhiala-Salminen, 2002), and that intertextual networks always exist between different emails as well as between emails and other business genres that are relied on by writers and receivers to interpret the meaning of the interaction (Cheng and Mok, 2008; Warren, 2013). While studies such as these have confirmed email is a collaborative genre that is characterized by intertextuality, textbook materials have been slow to reflect these findings and to provide appropriate practice materials. Bremner (2008), for instance, looked at the presentation of intertextuality in eight different coursebooks on business communication, and found that any information on intertextuality was largely implicit in the way in which it was presented. In a later review of the same coursebooks when he looked at activities focussing on collaboration Bremner (2010), found that ‘collaboration is discussed only in the most general terms’ and ‘few tasks provide students with activity-types that would help them understand and experience the kinds of collaborative interaction that they will encounter at work’ (2010: 121). Finally, most recently, Bremner and Costley (2018) show how difficult it can be for learners to understand the significance of intertextuality in email communication, and in particular the contribution that intertextuality can make to the writer-reader relationship. In other words, there is an apparent mismatch between the types of activities that textbooks suggest should be used in the classroom to practice writing, and the writing activities (and skills) that learners will actually need to accomplish once they enter the business arena.

One of the most extensive accounts comparing business email and textbook presentation is provided by Evans (Evans, 2010; Evans, 2012) and by Lam et al. (2014). In the first of these, Evans (2010) surveyed more than two thousand individuals working across four different industries in Hong Kong and found that the top five written business genres in the workplace were handling complaints, business emails, business letters, business memos and making complaints, almost all of which were written in English. In addition, both internal and external email messages were written at least once or twice a week, and all participants reported that they read email messages more than any other type of document. Following on from this, Evans (2012) then reports on the findings of interviews about email use with business professionals, together with a set of four detailed case studies where the communication activities conducted by these same professionals were recorded and observed, and the findings of an analysis of 400 authentic email messages comprising 50 email chains were discussed. Evans’ study confirms that email and spoken communication are inter-linked, and that business professionals have to deal with large numbers of emails every day. In addition, he found that internal and external email communication is different and should be looked at separately with learners and not treated as the same. Finally, he confirmed that authentic emails often look different than the models presented in textbooks, as they are characterized by intertextuality, informality and inaccuracy, which is largely absent in textbook models. Lam et al. (2014) then looked in more detail at how textbooks present different business English genres with reference to Evans’ findings, and showed that email was indeed largely decontextualized in textbook models, and that learners were not given any further explanation as to how the wider business context, and the relationship between the writer and recipients of the text, could shape the language that is used. Evans (2012) concludes that email should be included in all business English courses as a crucial form of business communication, and also that it should not be presented to learners in isolation. In addition, classroom tasks involving email should require reading, writing, listening and speaking skills, and learners should understand how email occurs as a part of a chain or network of communication events, as is the case in real-life situations.

One final area of scholarship also informed the design of our materials; the studies that have been done on the business writing produced by pre-experience learners, and more specifically, how this writing is viewed by business practitioners. For the past two decades, research such as this has attempted to understand more about how students write and how this may differ from the workplace context (Connor et al., 1995; Connor et al., 1997; Bhatia, 1993; Qian and Pan, 2017; Zhu, 2012). In a recent study, for instance, Zhang (2013) looks at how student writing in Mainland China is perceived by international business people, some of whom spoke English as a first language and some of whom spoke English as an additional language. The eight business professionals who took part in the study were asked to comment on their impression of 40 business texts written by pre-experience learners, including whether they felt the text was similar to professional writing, and their opinion about how appropriate various aspects of the text were, such as the vocabulary used, the structure of the sentences, and the organization of the text (Zhang, 2013: 147). The business professionals were generally positive about the students’ writing and the comments they made tended to focus on the tone of the messages, rather than on any inaccuracies they perceived in grammar or lexis. For instance, they removed any language they considered to be redundant, they tended to include boosters to make a message more positive, and they replaced any negative expressions with positive ones. As Zhang observes, the professionals were focussed on ‘mutual intelligibility rather than native-likeness’ (Zhang, 2013: 152). He recommends that learners of business English should be helped to understand how different genres are used in the workplace to accomplish specific tasks, that they should understand business writing therefore first and foremost as a business activity, and that they should focus on all the aspects of a text, including the people involved in the text and the business relationship between them.

Putting Research into Practice: Email and CMC in the Classroom

Our review of the relevant literature revealed four different, but interrelated, areas that we wanted to focus on in developing a set of activities which would be useful for our pre-experience learners. These were:

Raising our student’s awareness of business as a collaborative activity that is enabled through digital media like email.

Helping our learners to understand that effective email communication is not just a question of using correct grammar and vocabulary.

Understanding email as part of a chain or network of other communication activities that facilitate the process of business.

Considering email as a highly contextualized activity that depends on the people involved in the communication and the specific business transaction with which it is associated.

In the account that follows, we discuss how we worked with our pre-experience business students to encompass these different activities.

Participants

The business communication course described in this study is a core introductory (200 level) course on a Bachelor’s programme in Business Studies. The course aims to provide pre-experience students with the opportunity to practise and develop clear, concise and effective communication skills to meet the expectations of the international business community. The students meet for 80-minute sessions twice a week over 17 weeks. Each class has approximately 24 students and the classes are separated according to gender, as is the norm in all governmental institutions in UAE. All of our students are first language speakers of Arabic with proficiency levels in English ranging from high intermediate to native-like competence, most especially in speaking and listening. Most students will have achieved the national equivalent of an IELTS score of 6 or a TOEFL IBT of 80+ before beginning their business major. This means they have already achieved above a Level B2 in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), i.e. they can be assumed to have ‘the capacity to achieve most goals and express oneself on a range of topics’ (Cambridge, 2017). The majority of these students have no work experience and therefore no experience in writing business emails.

The Diagnostic Test

During the first three weeks of the semester, students learn the basics of business communication. They learn about the communication process and channel selection and they receive an introduction to intercultural communication. For the following three weeks, they then start working on email and putting their new knowledge of business communication into practice. We then assess them again formally at the end of this three-week period. We start each semester with a pre-test for diagnostic purposes only. In this test, the students are given a business scenario to write about and they then receive informal feedback based on the rubric used later in the semester to assess their writing. The pre-test assessment in Spring 2019 asked students to read a job posting for a summer internship with HSBC, alongside the bank’s mission statement and the criteria for the successful candidate. Using this information, they were asked to write the cover email for their job application. This introduced students to the contextualized nature of business communication, as well as introducing them to a type of communication that is part of a chain of communication and one which is also relevant to them.

When we looked at the results of the diagnostic test for Spring 2019, for instance, we found that although our students had some knowledge of how to compose a basic email, many of them also had difficulties, as follows:

Format, i.e. genre conventions and discourse textualization (Bhatia, 1993). Many emails did not follow the conventional layout of an email, i.e. they were not textualized according to the acceptable conventions of an email (Nickerson, 1999). For example, often the subject line was missing or the writer did not have an opening line that reflected the purpose of the email. In addition, in some cases both the salutation and the closing signature were not appropriate. It was also evident that most students were not aware of the importance of using white space in order to organize the text, and none used bullet points. In the diagnostic pre-test the students scored an average of 65% on these conventional discourse textualizations.

Content. Most emails lacked clarity and were extremely vague and repetitive. There was no clear purpose and none of the students oriented their text towards the recipient, i.e. they lacked an awareness of audience. None of the students made use of ‘you language’ to emphasize the reader’s interests and benefits in the email.

Language. The students had problems with tense and sentence structure, and run-on sentences were present in most emails. Spelling and punctuation mistakes were also a major issue that sometimes interfered with intelligibility.

Figure 1 shows an example of one of the emails that was submitted for the diagnostic test that is typical of ways in which our students wrote email before they had followed our course. The text of the email reads as follows (original uncorrected version):

Subject: Iternship weak

Dear, Ms. Rashar

Good afternoon,

Kindly I will graduate this semester So, I need work experience to complete my Internship course also, I need to have more knowledge and my skills. So, please can you help me with a chance to achieve experience to work in HSBC Bank Dubai.

thanks

regards

Figure 1.

One of the emails that was submitted for the diagnostic test.

In order to help them learn about emails and how to write them, during the three-week period when we were focussing on email, we provided our students with a set of scenario-based email tasks that referred to real situations that were relevant to them. These tasks were designed to contextualize the communication that takes place and to encourage them to view email as a collaborative and interactive activity. For example, Figure 2 presents one scenario where a student is unhappy about her grade for various reasons mentioned in the prompt; she needs to write an email to the instructor asking for a meeting to discuss the grade, but unfortunately, the instructor’s office hours do not suit her schedule, so she also needs to suggest a few alternative times. We asked students to write a response to these scenarios in class together, to critique each other’s work, and then to report back to the class on what they learned. We also encouraged students to practice outside of class, for instance, by writing emails to their other professors or to write appreciation emails to anyone who has been supportive towards them. We then provided time in class for them to raise any concerns and questions they might be having in writing their emails. As face-to-face communication is the preferred medium in UAE (Goby, Nickerson and Rapanta, 2016) our students rarely write if it can be avoided, and this encouragement promoted the use of email. Students reported back to the class that they were pleasantly surprised with the quick and efficient responses they received when they took the time to write a professional email in order to achieve a specific purpose.

Figure 2.

One scenario where a student is unhappy and responds via email.

In addition to these scenario-based email tasks, we gave the students approximately ten business scenarios which they can use for email writing practice. These exercises are provided only for student practice and they are not used for grading purposes. For example, students were asked to read an advertisement from a tourism company, and then use the information provided to create a university outing between faculty and students. The prompt asked students to use appropriate discourse conventions in the email correctly and provide audience benefits. Our approach to enabling students to understand email as a contextualized, collaborative, activity is described in more detail below.

Student Awareness of Business as a Collaborative Activity

In helping students understand how to create an email with shared sense of purpose and identity, we focussed on the discourse conventions that are used in email and included a discussion on five components that the pre-test suggested were problematic for many of our learners: the subject line; salutation; the opening line; inclusion of white space and the closing line. Pioneering work on business email by Gains (1999) and Nickerson (1999) suggests that these are the basic components that are used in establishing and/or maintaining a relationship between the writer and receiver of an email message. In our first discussions with students on the discourse conventions that are used in an email message, we provide them with a sample text that we use to help them understand the different parts of the text. This helps them to consider how best to use each one of the five different components. As the course progresses and they gain in confidence, however, we encourage them to write their own email messages without continually referring to the sample text.

Subject Line

The subject line is crucial for both the writer and the receiver. The subject line allows the reader to quickly determine the main idea of the email and it also helps the writer identify a clear purpose. We taught students a simple formula to write clear and purposeful subject lines in this manner: Purpose: Topic of the Email. For example, if students would like to submit an assignment to their instructor, we asked them to write: ‘Submission: BUS 207 Assignment’. This simple formula helped them to gain a clear purpose for the email and also helps with the opening line. We also developed an exercise that we used with our students to predict the contents of an email message just by looking at the subject line. In this exercise, the students worked with a partner in class and reviewed the email that they had actually sent just before the start of our course. We provided them with a set of descriptions that could be used to label the communicative purpose of an email, e.g. Request, Apology, Reply etc., and then asked the students to predict the contents of their partner’s email using these labels on the basis of the subject line that they had included in each email. This reinforced the importance of writing an effective subject line as it serves to open the interaction between the sender and recipient of an email (Albers, 2018).

Salutation

In the UAE and other Gulf countries, the use of honorifics differs from usage in Western countries (Goby, Nickerson and Rapanta, 2016). People generally use ‘Miss’ or ‘Sir’ plus a first name regardless of age or status. For example, students commonly address their professors as ‘Miss Angela’ or ‘Sir Jonathan’ when speaking or writing. This way of addressing people is widely accepted in the YYY and despite their high-proficiency in English, students do not know that titles are used differently in other parts of the world. Teaching them that what is considered as an appropriate salutation varies from one culture to another helps them to begin to appreciate the importance of intercultural communication in the business context. The students learn about the importance of addressing people with a title and family name in East Asian countries, as well as the use of and respect for business cards in Japan, China and South Korea. They learn that North American culture involves using a title and family name until a more friendly relationship is established and an invitation to use only a first name is given. Introducing the concept that the salutation in an email message may vary according to culture and to the status of a business relationship, e.g. is it a new relationship or an established relationship, helps students understand both collaboration and contextualization in business.

Opening Line

Once we have discussed the subject line and the salutation, we then move on to teach the opening. We ask students to take the subject line and then think about how they could transform it into a full sentence to attract the receiver’s attention and be collaborative. For example, if the subject line is ‘Submission: BUS 207 Assignment’ an appropriate opening line could be ‘Attached is the BUS 207 assignment you requested’, and for the subject line: ‘Query: BUS 207 Assignment’ an appropriate opening line could be ‘Would you please answer a question about the BUS 207 assignment’. We talk about how to use pronouns in the opening line to create a you-orientation for the reader and we discuss the importance of making a specific textual connection between the subject line and the opening line. These familiar situations for our students allow them to understand how collaborative opening lines like this also operate in business contexts and how business writers make a specific choice of pronouns to build a relationship with the receiver of the email (see also Nickerson, 2000).

Use of White Space and Move Structure

We encourage the students to include white space in their emails and to structure the emails with separate opening and closing lines, using bullets and shorter paragraphs. As pre-experience learners, with no knowledge of writing in professional contexts, our pre-test results showed that our students are much more likely to create an essay-like structure in their writing, than they are to format their text in order to help the reader to navigate quickly through their text. We teach students to use bullets when listing information in an email because it is easier and faster for the receiver to read, as well as providing the reader with the opportunity to respond with down-editing, i.e. to respond point by point within the email text (see also work in the field of document design, such as Farkas and Raleigh, 2013, that looks at how to help readers navigate more easily through a text). The students appreciated this suggestion because they felt that it reduced the opportunity to make grammatical errors when writing longer and more detailed paragraphs. The use of bullets helped them to organize their content and ensure all the necessary details were included, as well as shifting their writing away from the essay genre.

Closing Line

We teach students to understand that there is a relationship between the Salutation used in the email and both the Closing Line, e.g. ‘I look forward to hearing from you’, and the Close, e.g. ‘Kind regards’. We discuss a variety of different ways in which business writers may textualize these two parts of the email, as well as their purpose in the text. We also teach students that subject lines and closing lines are written on a separate line and that after the salutation, the writer should provide an opening line that has a clear purpose. Some students voiced a concern with this approach as they felt uncomfortable moving directly to the purpose of the email without a more extensive greeting in the form of well-wishes (see also Bhatia, 1993, for a discussion on the differences between application letters in the West and those in South East Asia). This comment was well-received and encouraged because it shows an awareness of intercultural communication, and it allowed us to discuss the fact that many cultures (Middle Eastern, Asian and African, etc.) prefer to open with a friendly greeting such as, ‘I hope you and your family are doing well’, rather than moving directly to the business transaction (Nickerson, 2000). It also allowed us to talk about the influence of North American pragmatism on business culture, which focusses on the transaction rather than the relationship, as well as prompting them to consider the importance of understanding their audience, addressing them in an appropriate way and deciding on an effective opening move (Bhatia, 1993; Scollon and Scollon, 2000). Therefore, students could assess the scenario and the person receiving the message, and then add a greeting in addition to the purpose of the email in the opening line if they felt it was appropriate because of the cultural background of the receiver of the message.

Overall, using appropriate discourse conventions in email supports Darics and Gatti’s (2019) findings that the use of digital technologies has dramatically changed how people interact at work. Knowing how to write concise emails with a clear, audience-oriented purpose is an important skill in interacting successfully through digital media in order to achieve effective collaboration between the two parties.

Email is More than Just Using Accurate Language

To help students to develop an awareness that email is more than just about language accuracy we first asked them to look up examples of how misplaced commas, hyphens or spelling errors have cost millions for businesses, e.g. Austen, 2006. This allowed them to see grammar as important for business, but also as only part of the story. We then asked them to look at their own writing and the results from their diagnostic test and to self-evaluate whether or not they needed to seek additional support through the Language Development Programme (LDP) that we offered in parallel to our course. The LDP aimed to help students work on their language proficiency outside of their normal classroom hours. In asking our students to become independent language learners in this way, we could then shift the main focus in the classroom towards other aspects of writing effective emails, such as the writer-receiver relationship and the collaborative nature of email as a form of digital communication (Darics and Gatti, 2019).

We then worked with our students to understand the purpose of different channels, e.g. telephone, letter, emails, SMS, face-to-face discussion, and their appropriateness, including a discussion on the concept of rich versus lean media (Lengel and Daft, 1988). As noted above, finding textbook materials that include MC is difficult, and therefore, to give students practice with MC, we provided relevant practice in various ways:

The instructor gave students her telephone number and encouraged them to contact her by SMS, WhatsApp, telephone and email. Although the students were given the telephone number, they were also warned to use the number appropriately and to develop professional ways of communicating. For example, calls or messages sent after 8pm would be responded to in the same fashion the next day in normal business hours. In addition, in providing her students with her telephone number, the students were also asked to evaluate how appropriate different media were for different types of messages, and where necessary, to create an intertextual network of messages. For example, they were asked to distinguish between a phone call, a text message or an email in asking for an extension to an assignment, or they were asked to create a follow-up email confirming an agreement made in a WhatsApp message if both the instructor and the student needed an official record of the agreement. Students were also asked at several points during the semester to consolidate a chain of messages into one email, and in doing so to learn how to combine different sources of communication that could then be used as a part of an MC interaction.

Students were encouraged to use their mobile phones in class to deal discreetly with incoming calls and messages, in order to develop the skills that they would need in the business setting (Gimenez, 2014), rather than using their mobile phone in a clandestine way.

The instructor provided students with support for MC during class. For example, if a student made a request face-to-face, the instructor then requested a follow-up email summarizing the conversation and the outcome of the conversation.

The instructor also provided students with a number of scenarios, as noted above, that encouraged the students to analyse the audience(s) and purpose, decide which channel(s) could be used to carry out the transaction, and finally create an appropriate response.

Understanding Email as Part of a Contextualized Network of Communication Activities

We helped students understand that email is a highly contextualized activity that depends on the people involved in the communication and the specific set of business transactions with which it is associated. We approached this by introducing students to some basic information on intercultural communication as a way of understanding how different cultures approach communication and why it is important to look at emails in context. The students read about Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions (2001) and learned that many cultures (e.g. North American, British, German etc.) are low context and therefore rely on words to convey direct meaning, however, other cultures, such as China and the UAE, are high context and use words for relationship building (Hall, 1976). We used these ideas to look at different scenarios in emails and then worked with the students to analyse the audience and respond appropriately. If the audience was from a low-context culture, for instance, the email started directly with the salutation followed directly by the task. If the receiver was from a high-context culture, the students started their emails with a salutation followed by a warm greeting or inquiry about health or family. This allowed our students to begin to understand how emails are highly-contextual and how the text of the email is determined by the people involved in the interaction.

Our Learners’ Experience

Email is a collaborative activity

Our discussions with our students over the three-week period when we focussed on email suggested that they became more aware of email as a collaborative activity that depends on a shared sense of purpose and relationship building. Their comments on each other’s texts became more perceptive and they were more able to report back to the class on why they felt a given email text would achieve its communicative purpose or not and how it would contribute to the existing relationship between the writer and the recipient. In addition, they showed they were able to discuss all three aspects of the texts, i.e. discourse textualization, content and language, and to provide information on the contribution made by each one towards the achievement of that purpose. This was a notable shift in their approach to the text in moving beyond the grammatical surface features of the texts towards a greater understanding of the role played by content and by using appropriate genre conventions.

A comparison of the diagnostic test at the beginning of the semester and the assessment held at the end of the three-week sessions on email showed an improvement in both the use of appropriate discourse conventions in the layout of the email texts and in the ability of the students to choose appropriate content, for the majority of the 129 students who were attending the course. In addition, the 32 students who had also sought additional support with the LDP recorded an average improvement of 18% in their overall grade for each assignment, suggesting that their awareness of effective writing had increased and not just their language accuracy.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, our students also self-reported that their other instructors were responding to their emails more quickly than usual, for the following reasons:

My emails look more professional.

My emails are easier to read and they have all the necessary information.

I think my professor takes me more seriously now.

My teacher noticed the difference in my emails and complimented me.

Email is More than Just Using Accurate Language

The news report by Austen (2006) which details the loss of one million Canadian dollars as the result of a misplaced comma prompted a great deal of classroom discussion. The students expressed shock and dismay that this could happen, and one student commented that they did not believe that this kind of grammatical scrutiny would be taken seriously in UAE. Perhaps as a result of this discussion, 32 out of the 129 students who were following our course (25%) also chose to attend the optional LDP face-to-face sessions; 13 of them booked appointments more than once. As noted above, after five weeks of language support, their final scores showed an average improvement overall in their performance on the writing test (18%). Table 1 shows the test results for the 32 students who attended the LDP sessions, indicating an improvement in their final grades. The average score of the diagnostic test was 69.6% while the final average score was 88.5% which reflects an increase of 18% in their grades. As noted above, it seems clear that those students who had sought additional support with the LDP had in fact increased their overall awareness of good email writing.

Table 1.

Test Results for Students attending LDP Sessions

Diagnostic Test Average Final Grade (%)	Posttest Final Average Grade (%)	Grade Improvement (%)	LDP Intervention (Number of Visits)
69.6	88.5	18	1–6 (average 2–3)

Email as Chain Interaction

Our experience both inside and outside of the classroom suggested that our students are adept at multi-communication. Students were comfortable using different communications such as WhatsApp, SMS, telephone, face-to-face and email and they appeared to be able to multi-task easily. They also understood the appropriateness of the different channels and when to use them, and they differentiated between lean and rich media (Lengel and Daft, 1988). For example, if students perceived a situation as important, they would consult with their instructor face-to-face rather than sending a digital message. Students also respected the instructor’s telephone number and rarely sent messages after 8pm. The SMS and WhatsApp messages they sent included short routine questions about the course content, questions from the textbook and class scheduling, but not about more serious issues. It was interesting to note that only one student per class would SMS the instructor about a certain question or issue. For example, one day there was confusion as to whether class would be cancelled for a university-wide function. The instructor responded to only one message, yet the whole class received the information. The instructor investigated how the students shared the information and discovered the students had created their own WhatsApp group to share information with each other about the class. We could conclude that our students were able to create effective inter-textual networks involving digital and spoken communication similar to those identified by previous research (Nickerson, 2018; Nickerson and Planken, 2016; Darics and Gatti, 2019; Gimenez, 2014; Zhang, 2013), e.g. a telephone discussion with the instructor about the cancellation of class was reported to the rest of the class in a WhatsApp message and then confirmed via email with the instructor. This allowed us to build on these skills and raise their awareness of how they could be usefully transferred to the business context.

One area requiring more improvement was with follow-up emails, as our classroom discussions revealed that students do not generally return to unanswered emails. On several occasions, the students would write emails that went unanswered for several days and sometimes a week, and they did not take the initiative to write follow-up emails. The instructor provided an intervention by teaching students to send quick follow-up emails using the same thread. As the students expressed surprise that sending a follow-up message would not be considered rude or aggressive, this then allowed us to discuss this form of communication as one possible way of achieving a business objective, including timing issues.

Emails are Highly Contextualized

The students showed a developing understanding of the highly contextualized nature of email and an ability to understand different audiences and accommodate them in different messages (Nickerson, 2018; Darics and Gatti, 2019; Gimenez, 2014; Zhang, 2013). Our experience was that with some knowledge of intercultural communication, they were able to analyse different audiences and to understand how to avoid insulting the recipient unintentionally. As noted above, we found both Hofstede’s ideas and Hall’s ideas useful as a starting point for these discussions (Hall, 1976; Hofstede, 2001), although we acknowledge the potential that is inherent in both of these theories to over-generalize. While the students were initially surprised about the use of honorifics in different cultures, for instance, they were quickly able to apply the new information. For example, instead of being addressed as ‘Miss’, e.g. ‘Dear Miss’, without the use of an additional name, students began addressing their North American instructor in emails as ‘Ms Albers’, e.g. ‘Dear Ms Smith’. The instructor then encouraged students to move to a more informal salutation and invited them to call her Robyn in further email correspondence. However, their resistance to doing so allowed us to continue the discussion on how we may also bring various aspects of our own culture to the table when we are engaged in digital communication.

Implications for Language Learning and Teaching

Our study has implications for other practitioners who teach business email to high-proficiency language learners, with little or no experience of the business world. First, our review of the relevant literature helped us to understand the various skills that scholars have identified as those that good business communicators need to achieve their goals and to get their work done. More specifically for email, the work by Gimenez (2014), by Evans (2012) and by Bremner and Costley (2018) was particularly illuminating in their view of email as contextual, intertextual and collaborative. Had we relied only on textbook models of business email, we would have been limiting our discussions to single instances of emails as well as to the surface features of the text. We would encourage practitioners to keep up to date with relevant research in ESP with its emphasis on what real business people do, and to then supplement their textbook materials where necessary with appropriate additional materials to help learners to understand the reality of the business world.

Second, placing their email skills within a familiar context for our students, i.e. as part of an instructor-student interaction, allowed them to better understand what it means to create relationships, analyse an audience, and collaborate with the person receiving the message. We then built on that understanding of email in general as a collaborative activity and explored with our students how creating and maintaining relationships is also at the heart of business writing (Zhang, 2013). Finally, encouraging autonomy in the LDP both allowed our students to develop their language accuracy skills in an independent way, while at the same time leaving us the time to focus on other aspects of email, such as understanding more about how different cultures interact and how to organize the text in an appropriate way to facilitate a positive (business) relationship. In other words, in shifting the emphasis away from language accuracy in our classroom discussions, we could then highlight those same aspects of the texts that professional business people have identified as being important (Zhang, 2013).

In our future work, we aim to find more ways in which we can relate our students’ existing experience with digital media to the knowledge and skills that they will need to develop to communicate successfully in the business arena. For example, we will look in more detail at how to incorporate appropriate practise in intertextuality, as discussed most recently by Bremner and Costley (2018), or collaboration, as discussed by Bremner (2010), or the range of skills that underlie the effective use of CMC that Gimenez (2014) has identified. In doing so, we hope to move further beyond the boundaries of the textbook to provide our students with appropriate and relevant experience to draw on as novice business writers.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Catherine Nickerson

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