Strategies used in Chinese university students’ ELF emails to remedy or prevent problems in understanding

Abstract

Although there has been a steady growth of empirical studies investigating spoken English as a lingua franca (ELF) usage in institutional settings, less attention has been paid to written texts. Email communication, despite its popularity nowadays, has scarcely been examined. To extend the existing ELF research into email discourse, this study investigates Chinese university students’ ELF emails in intercultural communication. The data were collected from 30 students in Mainland China, mainly consisting of inquiries about prospective programs, asking for help, financial disputes, and daily communication on campus. The paper analyzes and discusses the remedial and preemptive pragmatic strategies employed by the Chinese university students to remedy or prevent problems of understanding in their ELF emails. The results indicate that when the Chinese university students encountered misunderstanding in ELF emails, they employed metalinguistic comments to signal the problem. When they could not understand some utterances in the email they received, they tended to point them out straightforwardly using focused questions and metalinguistic comments. In addition, they often employed preemptive strategies such as ‘building shared knowledge and common ground’ and ‘confirmation checks’ to ensure the success of the ELF email communication.