Abstract

Email communication is pervasive in faculty interaction. As there exists status imbalance between students and professors in this type of context, emails are expected to cater for the uneven power relationships by means of using appropriate polite features. Previous research (e.g., Eslami, 2013; Salazar-Campillo & Codina-Espurz, in press) has pointed out the pragmatically deficient use of openings and closings in requestive emails sent by non-native students in educational contexts, revealing a lack of the expected deference and respect to the professor. In this paper, we firstly explore this topic further by looking at different groups of emails written by CLIL students to ascertain whether this variable affects students’ pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic ability when writing their emails. Secondly, a proposal for the teaching of openings and closings is suggested, which aims to help second and/or foreign language learners behave in a more target-like manner thus avoiding pragmatic failure.

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