Understanding the development of Chinese EFL learners’ email literacy through Exploratory Practice

Abstract

While many empirical studies demonstrate the effects of instruction on enhancing second language (L2) learners’ pragmatic competence (Rose, 2005), few have attempted to gain an understanding of the quality of classroom life in addition to instructional efficacy. Drawing on the framework of Exploratory Practice (Allwright, 2005), the present study examines how intermediate-level Taiwanese students of English enrolled in an advanced writing class developed greater pragmatic awareness in email literacy. Instruction was divided into four distinct stages: Setting the context, Modelling, Joint construction and Independent construction. The outcomes, gleaned through questionnaires, class discussions, student presentations, and pre- and post-instruction emails, provide striking evidence of greater pragmatic awareness and positive attitudes towards instruction on email literacy, and pinpoint aspects of email literacy which may require more instructional attention. Overall, this Exploratory Practice offers interesting insights into how instruction on pragmatics in everyday life (email literacy) can contribute to the quality of classroom life for English language students and their teacher.

Keywords

Email Exploratory Practice instruction pragmatics request

I Introduction

As a second language (L2) pragmatist and a language teacher, I have paid much attention to research in instructional pragmatics. This line of research has shown that most pragmatic features are teachable, that instruction leads to more effective learning than no instruction, and that an explicit approach is more effective than an implicit one (Rose, 2005). However, such intervention studies attempt to focus on the ‘quality of output’ rather than the ‘quality of life’ (Allwright, 2005, p. 353). To bridge this gap, I carried out practitioner research in the form of Exploratory Practice (henceforth EP) in my own class to understand the development of my students’ pragmatic competence in email literacy.

Practitioner research in the form of EP is not a research method; rather, it describes ‘a relationship of identity between the people being investigated and the people doing the investigation’ (Allwright, 2005, p. 357). Second, it denotes a ‘first person plural’ notion, which involves both teachers and students. Allwright and Hanks (2009) argue that in addition to teachers, students should also be involved in EP because they are unique, social beings, who are ‘practitioners of learning’ rather than ‘targets of teaching’ in a mutually supportive environment. Third, it deals with understanding ‘quality of life’, or ‘the nature of lives that people are living together in the practice under investigation’ (Allwright, 2005, p. 357). According to Allwright, there are two routes of understanding: upwards and downwards. In the traditional academic arena, researchers tend to investigate a phenomenon by looking upwards. Put simply, they generalize the findings and come up with a simple explanation. In practitioner research, the investigations are done by looking downwards. Practitioners look for deep human understanding of puzzles so that they can come up with an inclusive outcome that is not easily generalizable. Since EP aims at understanding, providing a solution to or expecting a change in a given situation is therefore not its ultimate goal.

The nature of practitioner research in the form of EP can thus be summarized into seven principles: put ‘quality of life’ as the first priority, work primarily to understand the ‘quality of life’, get everybody involved in the work for understanding, bring people together, conduct the work in a spirit of mutual development, integrate the work for understanding into classroom practice, and work for understanding continuously (Allwright and Hanks, 2009).

As mentioned earlier, my long-term concern is pragmatics-related instruction, which formed my initial puzzle area. Next, I needed to select a particular area of pragmatics to focus on. While I was pondering this, an incident occurred in my class that helped me determine my puzzle. I received an email from one of my third-year students who was taking my Advanced Writing course at that time. The email read as follows:

Dear Teacher Linda:

I know that there will be an important quiz, but I want to take a leave of absence tomorrow morning. I know you would permit my asking, wouldn’t you?

Thanks a lot!

Sincerely Yours,

Amy¹

To me, this email seemed inappropriate. First, ‘Dear Teacher Linda’ is an inappropriate greeting in English. In addition, Amy provided no explanation for her request. Finally, the sentence ‘I know you would permit my asking, wouldn’t you’ seemed to violate the politeness principle ‘Don’t presume/assume’ as proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987).

However, Amy’s email is not by any means rare. Research on L2 students’ email requests to faculty has shown a variety of pragmatic infelicities such as inaccurate address terms, inappropriate request strategies, insufficient request support, and so forth (see Hartford and Bardovi-Harlig, 1996). In view of this, I decided to link research and pedagogy by incorporating email requests to faculty into my writing class. I formulated three puzzles:

What are my students’ perceptions of email requests to faculty before instruction?

What are my students’ perceptions of the instructional materials and pedagogic activities designed to develop their email literacy?

In what ways do my students demonstrate greater pragmatic awareness when writing email requests to faculty as a result of instruction?

II Research context

This research was conducted in an advanced writing class for speakers of Chinese at a major university of technology in Taiwan (see also Chen, 2015). The class had 28 students: four males and 24 females, with ages ranging from 22–24 years. Their TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) scores fell within the intermediate level of 650–740. The students had received no formal email instruction before, even though they reported that they wrote an average of 2–3 emails in English to their course teachers every semester.

I adopted a genre-based approach to structure my email lessons for two reasons: I not only wanted to maintain syllabus integrity but also wanted to enhance my students’ email literacy while developing a better understanding of classroom life. This cycle involved five key stages: Setting the context, Modelling, Joint construction, Independent construction, and Comparing (Hyland, 2007). The first four stages encapsulate the notion of scaffolding in course design, with the teacher providing full support at the initial stages, and then gradually removing support as learners become more independent writers during later stages. I applied all five stages; however, because there was only one email type, requests to faculty, the last stage ‘comparing’ was deemed unnecessary.

III Stage-by-stage understandings

1 Setting the context: Exploring students’ competence

I used two approaches to probe my students’ current email competence before instruction actually began. In the first, direct approach, I designed four request situations, including a Paper extension, A favor for final scores, Leave of absence, and Invitation (Appendix 1, see also Chen, 2015, p. 135). The students were asked to work on these situations independently during the normal class hour. This enabled me to understand my students’ strengths and weaknesses based on the emails they wrote.

In the second, indirect approach, I asked them to evaluate authentic emails. Interlanguage pragmatics studies have used email evaluations to understand what impressions a given email leaves on its recipient (Hendriks, 2010). Since in these studies, English native speakers judged the appropriateness of email messages based on their L1 norms, I anticipated that my students would judge the email messages against their developing L2 interlanguage system, thus, revealing their existing pragmatic competence. With this in mind, I extracted three authentic email requests to faculty from Chen’s (2001, 2006) studies and designed a perception questionnaire that consisted of 10 questions, seven of which were statements to be rated on a four-point Likert-type scale. These statements were:

I think the style of this email is formal.

I think this email carries an appropriate tone in such a student–professor relationship.

I think this email reflects a close relationship between the student and professor.

I think this email is clear and informative.

I think this email is well-organized and coherent.

I think the student who wrote this email has the right to make this request.

I think it is likely that the professor will comply with this request.

Questions 1, 3, 6, and 7 dealt with the students’ sociopragmatic competence. Questions 2, 4, and 5 dealt with the students’ pragmalinguistic competence (Leech, 1983). The eighth question was related to evaluation of the student sender’s personality. Nine adjectives were listed: reliable, competent, and intelligent (relating to the competence dimension); controlling, authoritative, and dominant (relating to the power dimension); and sympathetic, tactful and considerate (relating to the agreeableness dimension) (Hendriks, 2010). The students were allowed to choose more than one answer. For the ninth and tenth questions, the students needed to evaluate the appropriateness of the email as a whole and provide general comments (Appendix 2, see also Chen, 2015, p. 146).

In class, I randomly organized the students into six groups, so each of the three emails was distributed to two different groups. Each group selected one leader to present their results. Based on the student presentations and questionnaire results, I understood the following:

My students judged the degree of formality of a given email primarily through greetings and closings. For example, the use of Hi and Best in the email prompts made them feel that the email was less formal. They also criticized that such an informal use failed to show deference to the professor and suggested using Dear + title + last name and Sincerely yours instead.

My students judged the student–faculty relationship by means of the common ground shared by both parties. All the groups thought that the student–faculty relationship evidenced in the three emails was close, as realized by utterances such as ‘…which you mentioned to me recently’, ‘Also, the chocolates are delicious…’, and ‘As you know…’.

My students acknowledged the student senders’ right to make study-related requests, but they also realized that it was the professor’s right to decide whether to comply with the request or not.

My students judged the clarity and informativeness of the emails primarily through the request itself and the request support. They believed that the student sender should tell the professor what exactly he or she was asking for and provide sufficient details to support the request. In addition, they judged the coherence of the emails in terms of how the information was organized.

Even though my students applied similar criteria in judging the sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic aspects of the email prompts, they differed in the evaluations of the student senders’ personalities. The first prompt² presented the most divergence. One group chose considerate and tactful to describe the student sender of this email. The group leader provided the reason in the presentation:

… We think that this student is considerate and tactful because she asked in advance if the teacher has time for her by saying: ‘When would it be convenient for you to meet with me?’ …

The other group, however, chose controlling and dominant instead to describe the student sender. The group leader provided the reason in the presentation:

… We think that this writer is self-centred. She made two requests ‘I’d like to make an appointment with you …’ and ‘I’d like to find out more about teaching EFL …’. The words she used were very strong, and she did not seem to care about what the teacher might feel …

This stage of exploration was quite valuable. It was beneficial to my lesson planning because I came to realize what my students already knew about email pragmatics. Additionally, such an exploration began to raise my students’ awareness of email pragmatics. As Brenda said, ‘This activity is interesting! Now I realize the way I write will affect what others think about me.’ But she also added, ‘What should I do to avoid making bad impressions?’ Apparently, for my students, judging the appropriateness of an email was easier than to write one on their own. Next, I moved to explicitly teaching my students how to write an appropriate email request to faculty.

2 Modelling: Understanding classroom practice

Although a large number of books on email etiquette are available, most of them focus on emails used in business rather than in academia. Adopting one of these commercially circulated books in my classroom might pose potential risks for the students because differences exist in the emails used in corporate and educational organizations (Gains, 1999).

Therefore, I decided to design my own instructional materials by relying on the empirical findings on email requests to faculty (e.g. Biesenbach-Lucas, 2007). These materials differed from textbooks in two ways. First, they focused on only one email type – requests to faculty – and, second, since these materials drew on empirical studies, they had a strong research basis, which has long been encouraged by instructional pragmatists (see Ishihara and Cohen, 2010).

I incorporated four essential elements of emails into my materials: Subject, Greeting, Message, and Closing (Crystal, 2001). To understand classroom life more easily, I divided the instruction into Presentation, Practice, and Reflection sessions. In the presentation session, I analysed the pragmatic features of each essential element. In the practice session, I assisted my students as they learned about the essential elements through a series of exercises. In the reflection session, I distributed a questionnaire and encouraged them to write down their perceptions of the instruction they had just experienced.

Based on my observations and the questionnaire results, I understood the following:

a Subject line

When asked to recall writing emails to professors, about two-thirds reported that they introduced themselves in the subject line. Jessica was typical of them:

I usually wrote ‘I’m Jessica from 3A’ as my subject because this way, the teacher would know that it was me who wrote this email, so that it wouldn’t be deleted.

From Jessica’s remarks, the subject line was for her to identify herself to the faculty member. However, she did not realize that a good subject line should include the purpose of the email. After I presented the function of a subject line, I used an extreme sample extracted from Chang and Hsu (1998) to illustrate how an inappropriate subject line might possibly have a negative effect in an email recipient. In the example, the subject line was ‘Long time no see’ followed by a long greeting ‘How are you? How are your wife and children in Taiwan? You must miss them a lot. I heard your family is coming to Ann Arbor this summer. Isn’t it great?’ The message closed with ‘By the way, I must attend a conference in New York. Please give me a ride on April 3 to the airport’ (p. 141). The students reported that when they saw the subject line, they thought it was a greeting to establish rapport between the sender and recipient. After reading the entire email, however, they realized that it was actually a request for a ride to the airport. When I asked my students to imagine how they would have felt if they had received this email, 26 out of the 28 students expressed negative feelings. They realized, through this lesson, how a seemingly unimportant subject line could impact a recipient’s impression of the sender. For me, this experience showed that the proper use of a negative example could be an effective instructional strategy (Long, 1996) to bring my students’ attention to what otherwise would have seemed less salient to them.

b Greetings and closings

Greetings and closings demonstrate great variability in email requests to faculty. During instruction, the students were told that the choice of a particular greeting or closing signals the perceived student–faculty relationship and is subject to cultural connotations. Generally speaking, low power-distance countries such as the USA (Hofstede, 2001) value egalitarianism, so emails from those countries typically allow for an informal style of greetings and closings (e.g. ‘Hi’, ‘Thanks’). By contrast, high power-distance countries such as Japan and China value social hierarchy and therefore prefer a more formal style of greetings and closings (e.g. ‘Dear Dr. Chen’, ‘Sincerely yours’) in emails. After I explained all the variants, I asked my students how they felt about using the informal greetings and closings with their professors. Twenty-four out of the 28 students reported that they still preferred to use more formal greetings to show deference, and that they felt uncomfortable using informal greetings and closings. Dora’s remarks represent these students’ voices:

I think I would still use something like ‘Dear Dr. Liu’ in my emails … because I’m not sure if the teachers in our department would think that I am rude if I use ‘Hi’, or ‘Hello’ …

Dora’s remarks were not surprising. Knowing most of her professors were native Chinese speakers, she anticipated that they would prefer a more formal style of writing. Nevertheless, through this lesson, she expanded her pragmatic knowledge that formal greetings and closings are not the only options, and that less formal variants are sometimes acceptable in cultures where authority is emphasized to a lesser extent.

c Request strategies and request support

In an email request to faculty, the message generally consists of request strategies and request support (i.e. explanations students offer for making their requests) (Bou-Franch, 2006). Following Biesenbach-Lucas (2007), I taught my students three broad types of request strategies: Direct strategies (e.g. ‘Please extend my paper’), Conventionally indirect strategies (e.g. ‘Would you please take a look at my paper?’) and Hints (e.g. ‘Attached is a draft of my proposal’). I also introduced the syntactical and lexical politeness devices used to mitigate the requestive force. I asked them to complete 10 request-making sentences by using the clues in the parentheses. Below is an example:

Exercise 3

Please make the request sentences based on the clues in the parentheses.

Asking for a copy of the readings (wonder/possibly)

Answer: I wonder if you could possibly give me a copy of the readings.

I presented several authentic examples extracted from empirical research, and directed them to discuss whether the support provided sufficient details for the professor to decide whether to grant the request or not. One student, Dana, asked a question about one of the email samples extracted from Hartford and Bardovi-Harlig (1996). This email started with the request:

Dr. R. I was wondering if you’d have any objections to letting me have the use of the books you put on reserve with L over the Thanksgiving weekend’, followed by an explanation for the request ‘I just found out that the office will be closed as of noon on Wed.’ (p. 65)

Dana asked if it was appropriate to provide the request before the support. Some of the students expressed similar doubts. In response, I explained the tendencies in information-sequencing between Chinese and English. For example, when making requests, Chinese native speakers tend to employ an inductive, ‘reason + request’ sequence to show indirectness and politeness (Zhang, 1995). On the other hand, American English native speakers tend to employ a deductive, ‘request + reason’ sequence to show clarity and brevity and to avoid the possibility that ‘information located at the end of the message might never be seen’ (Crystal, 2001, p. 109). I then asked the class to compare one of the emails extracted from Chen (2006) with the one mentioned above. In Chen’s (2006) email, the sender provides a long explanation as to why she chose to be an education major and how she later realized her real interest was linguistics after participating in several classes in the TESOL program in the USA. The sender’s request, ‘Consequently, I wrote this e-mail to ask you some information about transferring to graduated (graduate) linguistic anthropology program’ (p. 52), came at the very end of the email. By comparing these two emails, my students realize how differently the messages in these two emails were structured. Like greetings and closings, they came to realize that the message structure reflects different cultural connotations.

d Perception questionnaire

I designed a perception questionnaire to understand what my students felt about the email instruction, as shown below:

This questionnaire is to understand how you feel about the explicit teaching of email. Please answer the items carefully.

(1) Do you think the instructional materials are in general useful?

□ Yes. □ No.

Please state your reason(s): _________________________________

(2) There are four email essentials: subject, greetings, message and closings.

Please answer the following questions:

Which do you think is (are) the easier essential(s) to learn? Please state your reason(s): __________________________________

(3) Do you think the instruction in general benefits your email requests to faculty in the future?

□ Yes. □ No.

Please state your reason(s):__________________________________

For question 1, all the students expressed positive attitudes toward the materials. Seventeen out of the 28 students stated that the materials were organized systematically and enabled them to learn the material. For example, Mark wrote:

I like the organization of the materials very much. It presents the email essentials one at a time. The teacher used a lot of listings, charts and figures to help us understand these essentials.

In addition, 11 out of the 28 students mentioned the advantage of incorporating an abundance of authentic examples into the materials. For example, Jane wrote:

There are a lot of examples for us to see what other people do when writing email requests to professors. I think this is really good. Besides, the examples which are inappropriate can give us a warning to prevent the errors.

For question 2, 26 out of the 28 students remarked that Subjects (35%), Greetings (29%) and Closings (31%) were easier to learn. This is not surprising, for these three essential elements consist of short, simple expressions, which are easily controlled. On the other hand, 27 out of the 28 students reported that the Message essential was the hardest to learn. For example, Earnest wrote:

I find it hard to figure out a reason to convince the professor. Even if I have a good reason, I’m afraid that I am not able to express it clearly because I do not know some of the words. The choice of a request is not a problem to me, but the politeness devices were so many that they sometimes confused me.

The students’ difficulties with the Message essential element was likely due to the fact that the choice of a request strategy and provision of request support vary from situation to situation. For question 3, all the students thought that explicit instruction in email essentials was useful. For example, Anne wrote:

Most teachers would think email writing is a basic skill, and we students must know a lot about it because we use the computer every day. In fact, writing to professors is different from writing to friends. Sometimes we may offend the professor unintentionally without knowing the reason why. This instruction definitely provided me with the knowledge of how to write an appropriate email to my teachers. I think the knowledge is also useful if I go into the business world in the future.

However, even though the students responded positively to my instruction, 6 out of the 28 students suggested that more exercises be provided, especially in terms of the Message section. For example, Karen wrote:

… I wish the teacher had given us more exercises to practice the sentence patterns and politeness devices. In this way, we would be more familiar with the request and the ‘little words’ which help to reduce the impact of a request. In addition, support is a troublesome area to me, and I think more exercises or discussions are necessary …

3 Joint construction: Wrapping it up

In this stage, I gave the students an opportunity to apply what they had learned by writing an email for the request situation that follows (see also Li, Chen, & Rau, 2011, p. 157):

You want to take a leave of absence the next morning, so you ask your course teacher for permission. How would you make the request to the teacher by email?

The situation was typed on the head computer in broadcast mode so that every student computer had the same image. As the students were drafting their email collaboratively, it would appear on the screen so that we could analyse it together. The drafting process was cyclical: after one or two students contributed their ideas about a certain part of the email, the rest of the students debated these ideas and then made a final decision to reject or fine tune them.

During this discussion, I chose not to intervene because I believed that this sort of self-discovery process is crucial for learning. I offered assistance only when necessary, such as when they did not know how to say a word in English. Most of the students were quite involved in this activity and seemed to be enjoying the activity. Their final email is below:

Subject: Request for a leave

Dear Dr. Johnston:

This is Angelina Chang from your Listening course on Wednesday morning. I’m sorry that I cannot attend your class on May 4. I totally understand that you are usually not happy to permit students for a leave, but I’m writing this e-mail to you in order to ask for your permission. This is important for me because I was notified to attend a job interview held by TSMC, and the time will be at 8:30am in their headquarter in Taipei. I have enclosed the notification from TSMC for your reference. It will be my pleasure to receive your reply soon.

Thank you for your time.

Yours faithfully,

Angelina

As they crafted the email, they created an imaginary figure Angelina Chang as the student sender. They chose an imaginary figure, rather than a member of the class, because they felt it would distance themselves from the request situation. Interestingly, they chose a real faculty member in our department as the recipient because he had a habit of checking attendance in all of his classes. They demonstrated greater pragmatic awareness by adopting some strategies that were not taught in the ‘modelling’ stage. For example, Lena proposed to add a self-identification sentence at the beginning of the message: ‘This is Angelina Chang from your Listening course on Wednesday morning.’ She thought that it was important for Angelina to introduce herself under the circumstance because Dr. Johnston was a new teacher in the department. Moreover, after the class made the request: ‘I’m writing this email to you in order to ask for your permission’, May proposed to add something prior to the request to make it sound more polite: ‘I totally understand that you are usually not happy to permit students for a leave …’ Such a disarming strategy is generally used to remove any potential objections the professor may raise upon receiving a request (Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper, 1989).

Their emerging pragmatic awareness was also evident in the request support they provided. They spent a great deal of time on this section of the email because they realized it was key to the professor granting the request. After the class decided that requesting a leave for a job interview would be a nice idea, Belle proposed a general principle for the class to follow: ‘Dr. Johnston has very strict rules about class attendance, so we’d better add enough details to let him think this is an eligible absence request.’ As a result, the students had a long, vigorous discussion about how to justify the request. Finally, they decided on three things: (1) the time of the interview should conflict with the Wednesday morning class; (2) the location of the company should be far away from the school, making it impossible for Angelina to rush back to the class; and (3) the company’s notification should be attached as strong evidence of the reason for the leave. They crafted the support reason as follows: ‘This is important for me because I was notified to attend a job interview held by TSMC, and the time will be at 8:30am in their headquarter in Taipei. I have enclosed the notification from TSMC for your reference.’

4 Independent construction: Examining student growth

In this stage, I asked the students to work on four post-instruction situations independently (Appendix 1). A total of 224 pre- and post-instruction scripts were evaluated by two experienced writing teachers on a four-point scale (4 – Appropriate, 1 – Inappropriate). The inter-rater reliability coefficients were .81 for pre-instruction scripts and .85 for post-instruction ones. A paired samples t-test showed a statistically significant increase from pre-instruction scores (M = 2.39, SD = 0.336) to post-instruction scores (M = 3.18, SD = 0.592), t(27) = 6.37, p < 0.01 (see also Chen, 2015).

A closer examination of individual students’ pre- and post-instruction emails provides interesting insights into their growing pragmatic awareness. Lisa’s changes shown below were representative of those made by most students.

Before the instruction

Subject: Extension

Dear Professor Huang:

I’m Lisa in your Reading class. I’m sorry that I cannot finish the paper today because my head hurt last night. I will finish the assignment tomorrow. Could I ask for an extension? I’ll make my assignment perfect. Please give me a chance to hand it out.

Thank you.

Sincerely yours,

Lisa

After the instruction

Subject: Asking for an extension

Dear Professor Chen,

I’m Lisa in your English writing class. I was wondering if you could perhaps give me an extension on my research paper. I had a car accident yesterday and the doctor told me I had to stay in the hospital for observation for at least two days, so I couldn’t hand in my paper on time. I promise I’ll hand it in as soon as possible.

Thank you so much!

Sincerely,

Lisa

As can be seen here, Lisa did not differ much in her use of Subjects, Greetings, Self-identifications and Closings before and after instruction. The biggest differences were found in the request strategy and request support. Lisa used query preparatory ‘Could I ask for an extension?’ before instruction, but employed an embedded clause ‘I was wondering if you could perhaps give me an extension on my research paper’ after instruction. The syntactical structure of the former request is shorter and simpler, while that of the latter is longer and more complicated. In addition, Lisa used the lexical modifier perhaps in order to weaken the force of the request after instruction, but no such an attempt was observed before instruction. As for the support, Lisa mentioned before instruction that she couldn’t finish the paper because she had a headache the night before the deadline. After instruction, however, she used the doctor’s professional advice to increase the credibility of her support.

While Lisa represented most students, Peter was representative of a smaller group of six students who were low achievers (TOEIC scores 650–670) compared to their peers in class. Below are Peter’s pre- and post-instruction responses to the A favor for final scores situations.

Before the instruction

Subject: This is Peter

Dear Professor Linda,

This is Peter from your required course. I receive my school report, and I found that I got 58 from you. Why do I get this score? Did I fail to deliver the homework you gave? Or there are some other reasons? Please reconsider the score you give me.

Student

Peter

After the instruction

Subject: My scores

Dear Professor Lin,

This is Peter. I am in your Translation class. I know I got 58 today. Although I studied hard, I still failed many courses this semester. If I fail one more course on the final, I will be expelled from school. So can you add two more points to me?Thank you very much.

Sincerely,

Peter

Peter’s pre-instruction email seemed inappropriate, vague and impolite in addition to containing several grammatical errors. Not only do the greeting and closing constructions deviated from native norms, the subject line did not address the theme of the email message. In addition, the course name and support for the request were missing. And, finally, it is impolite because the machine-gun questions sounded imposing and ‘Please + imperative’ further intensified the coerciveness of the request, and no acknowledgement was made to the professor. However, Peter demonstrated greater pragmatic awareness in the post-instruction email. He addressed the theme of the email message in the subject line (i.e. ‘My scores’), used the correct greeting (i.e. ‘Dear Professor Lin’) and closing (i.e. ‘Sincerely Peter’) constructions, specified the course name (i.e. ‘Translation class’), provided support for the request (i.e. the need to pass to stay in school), employed query preparatory for the request (i.e. ‘Can you add two more points for me’), and acknowledged the cost of the request to the professor (i.e. ‘Thank you very much’).

IV Implications and conclusions

My students’ positive comments and evidence of growth in the post-instruction email task suggests that the instruction was in general successful. However, what sets the present study apart from most interlanguage pragmatics research is a greater ‘understanding[s] of the quality of language classroom life’ (Allwright, 2003, p. 114). Indeed, this experience has offered me stage-by-stage understandings of my students’ email literacy development and their perceptions of my instruction. What’s more, it has widened my horizons of English language teaching and given me an opportunity to reflect on the development of my students’ language learning in a broader sense.

As a language teacher for approximately 20 years, I typically teach standardized norms to my students. However, this notion is challenged when it comes to teaching email pragmatics because there are no ‘generally agreed upon conventions for institutional email communication’ (Biesenbach-Lucas, 2007, p. 62). In the contemporary world, where English is used as a lingua franca, students are very likely to have opportunities to send emails to countries in the inner circle (e.g. the USA, Britain), the expanding circle (e.g. Singapore), and the outer circle (e.g. Japan, China, Korea) (Kachru, 1985). Although no one would doubt that the student–faculty hierarchy should be properly acknowledged in email writing, how ‘proper acknowledgment’ is defined and interpreted may vary from context to context.

Such fuzziness perhaps makes L2 students’ development of email literacy more complicated than that of other language areas such as lexicogrammar. From this Exploratory Practice experience, I realized that my students needed to gain a general understanding of how the student–faculty relationship is perceived in different cultures, and why a particular email style may be preferred over another. Hofstede’s (2001) high and low power-distance dichotomy may be a useful rubric for students to develop such an understanding. Furthermore, I have come to realize how important it is for students to acquire basic email essentials and have a repertoire of formal and informal variants at their disposal. My goal was to ensure that they have the ability to choose from an array of variants for what seems to be the most appropriate in the circumstances they encounter. Explicit instruction can play a positive role in developing their pragmatic awareness, as demonstrated by the present study.

Perhaps one limitation of the present study is that it focused on only one genre type: email request to faculty. However, learning such a genre type has its advantage, too. Instruction in this particular genre type helped develop my students’ awareness at the ideational, interpersonal and textual levels (Halliday, 1994). At the ideational level, they learned to identify the purpose of writing. At the interpersonal level, they learned to notice the sociopragmatic information inherent in a given sender-recipient relationship. At the textual level, they learned to employ the pragmalinguistic devices to reflect such a relationship to achieve appropriateness. For my students, such awareness will most certainly be beneficial when learning and analysing other genres, as well as engaging in various types of literacy activities.

In conclusion, Exploratory Practice has enabled my students and me to broaden our understanding of classroom life while at the same time developing greater pragmatic awareness of email literacy. This experience was highly enjoyable and meaningful for all involved. Many challenges still remain, though, and furthering our understanding is a continuous enterprise that calls for ongoing dialogue between teachers and students in all instructional settings.

Footnotes

Appendix 1

Appendix 2 Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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