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E-Mail Requests

Thomas Mach
Miyazaki International College, Japan

Shelly Ridder
Koc University, Turkey

Level: Intermediate to advanced

Time: 10 minutes in one lesson, about 20 minutes of homework for students, and about 2 hours in subsequent lessons

Resources: E-mail access (in or out of the classroom) for all students and teachers

Goal: To develop appropriate written request strategies


Description of the Activity
This lesson begins with requests written by the students. In this activity, written requests made via e-mail from the students to the teacher are used to illustrate various points of pragmatic appropriateness. Students individually submit their requests and the teacher puts useful ones together on worksheets and distributes them. The students then work in groups to analyze and revise the messages with advice from the teacher. Exactly which pragmatic points are taught is dependent upon what can be mined from the messages students write, but the teacher wields some control by pre-selecting the messages that will be analyzed in class. Messages that clearly show typical errors made by ESL/EFL learners work best. Messages containing appropriate structures that can be used as models are also useful. For example, in our class we selected the following request written by one of our students:

Hello Shelly! If you think it's OK, please give me some more sources. I'll bring the introduction and questions on Tuesday's class, so please advise me and give me some comments about them. If you have any ideas or suggestions about them, please tell me.

This message allowed us to focus on three important points with our students:

1) Overreliance on the word please to disguise speaker-centered me imperatives (give me, advise me, tell me).

2) Lack of politeness strategies that would allow for an easy refusal of the request (note the absence of modals and question marks).

3) On a positive note, the writer's skillful inclusion of if clauses to signal acknowledgment of the request's imposition ("If you think it's OK..." and "If you have any ideas or suggestions...").
We have found that when students working in groups are given ample time to analyze messages, they are often able to come up with such points on their own. Also, students appear to be highly engaged during this activity because it involves materials they create.

Procedure

1. e-mail requests assigned as homework

a. Ask students to send you a message in which they make a request regarding any appropriate topic (e.g., a future class activity, a class party, an assignment clarification).

b. Assign a due date

i. Allowing at least one week will increase the likelihood of authentic requests as opposed to forced ones.

ii. Drop hints for possible requests during lessons that precede the due date. (For example, after a new activity, you might ask, "Was today's activity helpful? Do you want to do it again in a future lesson? If so, how can we make it better? If you have any ideas, please e-mail me.")

2. Creation of worksheet (or OHP)

a. Sort through all the requests and choose ones from which a few easily grasped points can be illustrated and taught.

b. If available, include positive examples on the worksheet to serve as models.

3. Analysis of request messages

a. Distribute worksheets and have each student rate the messages according to their appropriateness.

b. Put students in groups so they can compare each others' ratings.

c. Tell students to support their ratings by explaining at least one clue in each message that helped them to decide how to rate it.

i. Circulate during this time so that you will know from whom to elicit remarks in the subsequent discussion.

ii. Listen for students using explanations based on the pragmatic rules of their native languages in order to address cross-cultural issues.

d. Discuss the worksheet as a class.

i. Elicit student ratings and explanations.
ii. Offer your own rating along with concrete reasons for your choices.

4. Revision of request messages

a. Have groups revise selected messages based on what they learned in the discussion.
b. Have each group share and explain one of its revised messages.

Rationale
Hartford and Bardovi-Harlig (1996) have found that non-native speakers' e-mail messages to faculty differ markedly from those of native speakers, particularly in their lack of "downgraders" and acknowledgement of the degree of imposition of their requests. Students have a lot to lose if they unintentionally offend their instructors, so it is important to help them learn how to make pragmatically appropriate requests when addressing faculty members.

E-mail has been chosen for this activity because of its rising status as a preferred medium of communication in institutional settings and because it allows teacher to easily collate and edit student messages. Although e-mail requests from students to teachers may at first appear to fill a limited communication niche, this type of request actually is quite prevalent in institutional settings. Lessons learned from this activity are therefore immediately relevant to students in their school settings, but also relevant when students act as lower-status requestors in the wider sphere of work and officialdom.

Alternatives and Caveats
This activity works best as a diagnostic tool because its open-ended nature allows a wide variety of anticipated and unanticipated pragmatic issues to surface. The activity also can easily be adjusted to focus on other written speech acts such as compliments, suggestions, and apologies.

The requests used in this activity arguably are not sufficiently authentic because they are written in response to an assignment; however, if the teacher suggests class-related topics that interest students and about which they have opinions, the authenticity of the messages is enhanced. We suggest creating a folder for saving all unsolicited e-mail requests from students because they are a great source of typical pragmatic problems that can be used for this activity and many others.

If students have not experienced many other pragmatic activities, they will likely focus on surface problems (e.g., grammar errors, spelling mistakes) when asked to analyze messages. One way to encourage them to focus on pragmatic issues is to edit their messages before distributing the worksheet. We prefer to remind students to focus on the mood of the message and to analyze how that mood is created. Usually this leads to some helpful class discussion about cross-cultural differences (e.g., differences in the assumed obligations of teachers, politeness strategies, etc.) that are the root of students' pragmatic problems in English.

Reference
Hartford, B. S. & Bardovi-Harlig, K. (1996). "At your earliest convenience:" A study of written student requests to faculty. In L. F. Bouton (Ed.), Pragmatics and Language Learning, Monograph Series, Vol. 7 (pp. 55-69). Urbana Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, Division of English as an International Language (DEIL).

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