Date

2021-6

Author

Dinç Altun, Nilay

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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The study at hand investigates adult ESL learners' request emails to the faculty. The study aims to reveal the request strategies and the use of email components in the authentic emails of adult ESL learners when sending a request email to the faculty. For this purpose, 145 naturally occurring request emails were collected from the intermediate level students at an adult public school in Washington DC. The study examines the level of directness, internal and external modification, forms of address, request perspectives and email components. The analysis was performed based on an adapted model of the CCSARP framework developed by (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989). The email components were analyzed with the adapted model of the framework developed by (Zhu, 2012a). The data were coded and analyzed with the MAXQDA2020 software package. The findings demonstrate the participants' tendency to use direct request strategies and the lexical modifier 'please' to mitigate their requests. Additionally, a more informal tone is identified in greetings and closings, which are preferred in most email messages. All in all, the findings highlighted the pragmalinguistic skills that adult ESL learners need to develop in order to send a formal request email to faculty and suggest that integrating digital literacy and the pragmatic aspect of language into ESL curricula can better serve the needs of adult ESL learners.

Subject Keywords

Emails, Requests, Requestive Emails, Pragmatics, ESL

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/91123

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis