Discourse organization and features of email writing among EFL Studentsin Taiwan

Abstract

This study investigates how Taiwanese EFL learners use their linguistic repertoire to communicate with their teachers in emails. A corpus of 76 emails were collected and analyzed according to (1) language choice; (2) function; (3) patterns of the main messages; and (4) spoken and written features. The results show that, first, both groups of students prefer English as the main language of communication in their emails. Moreover, the students were found to code-switch in the emails. Second, two main functions were identified in the emails: request and inquiry. Third, three main elements were found in students’ email writing: a self-identification of the student, the main purpose of the email (e.g., request, inquiry, and apology), and an optional thanking formulaic expression. Comparing graduate and undergraduate students, the writing style of the graduate students is more formal than that of the undergraduate students. In terms of features of email writing, email is unique in the sense that it combines features from both speech and writing. Finally, the students were found to employ strategies of visualizing nonlinguistic characteristics in emails which are prominent in spoken interaction.