View Content #19282

By Kelsey Hertel, University of Oregon graduate student in the LTS program.

This activity begins with an e-mail response homework assignment. The purpose of this assignment is for students to write their own response e-mail with a given prompt and later assess and revise according to L2 pragmatic standards and format expectations. Because the teacher will receive these e-mail responses before the pragmatic lesson is instructed, the teacher may be able to find common pragmatic issues in students' work. These points may be focal areas of pragmatic instruction in the following lesson.

Students will rate sample e-mail responses on a scale from terrible to excellent. Students will discuss with a partner about their reasoning for each ranking choice. Then the teacher will facilitate a class discussion without imposing his or her personal opinions. Following the class discussion, students will revise their personal response e-mails and will discuss with partners why they chose or chose not to change specific aspects of their e-mail.

The handout, assessment rubric and further information about the context, rationale and background can be found here in one file.

Objectives:

By reading, analyzing, and rating a variety of pragmatically varied e-mail responses and by discussing how the recipient's response would vary based on the e-mail responses, students will be aware that:

• there are successful and unsuccessful pragmatic responses to e-mail requests.
• a pragmatic misstep may cause conflict or customer dissatisfaction.
• American e-mail etiquette may differ from their own culture's e-mail etiquette.

At the end of this unit, students will be able to:

• identify successful and unsuccessful responses
• write response e-mails that adhere to L2 pragmatic norms

Procedure:

1. E-mail responses assigned as homework.

a. Teacher distributes Loretta's e-mail to each student.

b. Students write a professional response to this email and send it back to the teacher by due date.

c. Teacher assigns a due date (allowing a few days for students to respond will increase the likelihood of better-written responses)

d. Teacher prints out all of the students' e-mail responses on individual sheets.

2. Ranking activity

a. Teacher distributes the handout to the students.

3. Analysis of e-mail responses

a. Individual rating activity: Students read each e-mail response and circle excellent, good, poor, or terrible.

b. Partner discussion: Students explain their ranking choices by telling their partner at least one clue in each e-mail that helped them decide their ranking choice.

c. Class discussion: Students explain their ranking for each e-mail response. Teacher allows students to express their opinions. Teacher asks students what/how they think Lorette would respond to each e-mail.

4. Revision of students' original e-mail responses

a. Teacher passes out printed versions of students' individual responses.

b. Students work for 10 minutes to revise their own e-mail response message.

c. Students talk with partner about why they changed or didn't change specific things and answer these questions:

How do you think Loretta would respond to your first e-mail response? Why?

How do you think Loretta would respond to your second e-mail response? Why?

Which e-mail response do you think is a more 'successful' response? Why?

d. Teacher uses the rubric to assess students' work.