View Content #19445

By Sarah Murphy, University of Oregon graduate student in the LTS program.

This Activity of the Week seeks to draw from students' extant understanding and experience with technology in order to build pragmatic awareness of conventions associated with formal digital communication in North American English.

Ishikawa (2013) finds that “word distribution as well as politeness strategies can be influenced by the imposition of the task involved, social distance between the speaker and the addressee, and the relative power of the speaker over the addressee” (p. 62). In this activity, students will have opportunities to raise their awareness of how these components manifest in email requests from students to their professors. I will ask them to rank the size of their requests and the social distance between themselves and the recipients of their digital communications.

Fragale (2012) reports on “upward deference,” stating that “as the message recipient’s rank relative to the message sender’s rank increases, senders should become more concerned with managing the face of the recipient” (p. 337).  She further asserts that “not expressing deference to superiors could be viewed as a status or face threat” (p. 337). In order to increase the likelihood of students’ success, we will observe and analyze different emails for elements that display deference appropriate to the student-teacher relationship, as well as those that could be perceived as face threatening in this context.

According to Bhatia (2002), discourse analysis should include textual, genre and social perspectives. In this activity, learners will recognize the distance associated with the relationship at play, the tendencies associated with digital communications, and the textual components associated with positively received email interactions in this context. Structures include: Salutations, length of email, use of slang, use of non-traditional spelling, and phrasing associated with request strategies between people with asymmetrical rank.

The context, procedure and materials are all here in one file. The student handout is here.

Objectives

• Students in small groups will be able to identify at least 2 (per group) qualities of successful and unsuccessful emails.
• Students will be able to use a list of class-made rules to rewrite an impolite email and explain their choices in a short presentation.
• Students will be able to offer feedback to their peers when called on to do so.

Assessment
The teacher conducts formative assessment by circulating and observing group work as well as by calling on groups to contribute to class-wide discussions.  The teacher can also perform a summative assessment of students’ email rewrites (homework) using a rubric that is based on the rules developed during this class and posted to Moodle or otherwise made available to the students.

References
Bhatia, V. K. (2002). Applied genre analysis: A multi-perspective model. Ibérica: Revista de la Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos (AELFE), 4, 3-19.
Fragale, A. (2012). Appeasing equals: Lateral deference in organizational communication. Administrative Science Quarterly, 57(3), 373-406.
Ishikawa, Y. (2013). Gender differences in request – A statistical analysis of American English in the NICT JLE Corpus. International Journal of Humanities and Management Sciences (IJHMS), 1(1), 57-62.