Teaching with Technology

When I began pursuing my second bachelor’s degree in America five years ago, I encountered a lot of difficulties that I had never expected.  One of them was e-mail communication with my professors.  I wondered whether my e-mails should look like letters or look like speech, and I wasn’t sure if the words that I was using were appropriate for e-mail communication.  In addition, I didn’t know the proper tone of language that is expected in e-mails between students and professors in America.  I struggled more when I was writing e-mails to professors than when I was writing papers for class.  In “The Development of E-mail Literacy: from Writing to Peers to Writing to Authority Figures,” author Chi-Fen Emily Chen suggests that the difficulty that I had faced was common to international students who are studying in institutions of higher education in America. 

 In her paper, Chen argues that the development of e-mail literacy, which is the pragmatic competence and critical language awareness in using the e-mail medium, is a pressing issue in the digital era.  Studies of the e-mail practices of international students have found that these students have ineffective communicative skills with regard to e-mail interactions with professors.  Foreign students, in comparison with American students, use fewer modal constructions, employ fewer negotiation moves, solicit professor responses less explicitly, and show a lack of respect for or resistance to the authority of the instructor.  This is likely having a negative impact on their studies.  To gain a deeper understanding of why international students have such problems in e-mail communications, and to determine how they might develop their e-mail literacy, Chen conducted a longitudinal study of the e-mail practices of Taiwanese graduate students in the United States.  Chen’s study focused on  status-unequal e-mail communications in an academic context.  The lone participant in the study was a young woman who earned a master’s degree in education and a Ph.D. in linguistics at a U.S. university.  The data for the Chen study consisted of 168 e-mails that this young woman had sent to peers and 98 e-mails that she had sent to her professors during the two and a half years that she was studying in America.

 Not surprisingly, many of the e-mails that she sent to her professors were inappropriate.  The e-mail that she sent to her professors during her master’s studies were usually lengthy and included many unnecessary details, which suggests that she was not aware of the importance of being concise in such correspondence.  These e-mails also showed that she used “Want Statements” (e.g., I want/need/hope you….) more frequently than “Query Preparatory Statements” (e.g., Can/could/would you. . . ) when making requests.  Chen points out that these “Want Statements” and her frequent use of the word help likely gave her professors a negative image of her.  In the U.S. academic culture, it is more appropriate for graduate students to demonstrate independence and confidence.

 Chen noticed that the e-mails of this young woman changed considerably over her period of academic studies.  After two years of study in the United States, her academic e-mails  became shorter and more task-oriented and contained fewer “Want Statements” and more “Query Preparatory Statements.”  Chen believes that these changes were attributable to the implicit learning that she obtained through interaction with native speakers and also to her new identity as a doctorial student.

 In the conclusion to her study, Chen proposes that second language learners receive explicit instruction in email communication with professors and other people of high rank.  I agree with Chen.  Without explicit training in e-mail communications, international students with large vocabularies and a strong knowledge of English grammar will often have difficulty in composing appropriate e-mails to professors.  These students need to be taught the norms and values that are expected of students in the American academic environment.  They also need to develop mastery of the style of academic e-mails.  ESL programs for prospective college students should address this issue by providing a unit of instruction on e-mail communications.

 Joann