The present study investigates how Korean university students formulate their requests in English emails toward their nonKorean professors. The data is comprised of 150 requestive emails sent to six foreign professors teaching freshmen English courses at a Korean university. First, the email data was classified into five different request types: requests for test results, requests for classrelated information, requests for feedback, requests for grade changerevision, and requests for meeting. Then, the data is analyzed with a focus on request strategies and internal modifiers that the students employed in forming their requests. The findings reveal that the students largely resorted to direct strategies and inadequately mitigated their requests lexically and syntactically. In addition, the students’ use of strategies and mitigating devices did not significantly differ across the request types. The findings suggest that the students generally lacked linguistic flexibility and politeness strategies to write statuscongruent requestive emails. Pedagogical implications are discussed regarding the findings
English Language and Linguistics 19(3) 171 Requests in Student-to-Professor Emails of Korean EFL Students*1 Young-Sook Shim (The Catholic University of Korea) Shim, Young-Sook 2013 Requests in student-to-professor emails of Korean EFL students English Language and Linguistics 19.3, 171-194 The present study investigates how Korean university students formulate their requests in English emails toward their non-Korean professors The data is comprised of 150 requestive emails sent to six foreign professors teaching freshmen English courses at a Korean university First, the email data was classified into five different request types: requests for test results, requests for class-related information, requests for feedback, requests for grade change/revision, and requests for meeting Then, the data is analyzed with a focus on request strategies and internal modifiers that the students employed in forming their requests The findings reveal that the students largely resorted to direct strategies and inadequately mitigated their requests lexically and syntactically In addition, the students’ use of strategies and mitigating devices did not significantly differ across the request types The findings suggest that the students generally lacked linguistic flexibility and politeness strategies to write status-congruent requestive emails Pedagogical implications are discussed regarding the findings Key words: academic emails, speech acts, requests, email etiquette, politeness Introduction Korean students increasingly need to communicate in English with their non-Korean professors in order to keep up with the global context of university life When communicating with international faculty, students often choose email over face-to-face interaction because they can take time to compose and revise their messages One of the students’ primary purposes for writing emails to their professors is to make a request Students write emails to make various kinds of requests of their professors: requests for appointments, requests for feedback on written work, requests for information about academic matters, requests for assignment extensions, requests for grade * This work was supported by Research Fund 2012 of the Catholic University of Korea 172 Young-Sook Shim changes or grade revisions, and many more (Economidou-Kogetsidis 2011) Although email helps reduce students’ anxiety about communicating with faculty, Korean university students may confront difficulties in writing requestive emails to their professors for the following two reasons: the nature of the speech act (i.e., request) and the power difference between the student and the professor Posing a request is a potentially face-threatening act (Brown and Levinson 1987) in its nature because the person making the request tries to make the hearer something that he/she would not have to otherwise For that reason, the speaker tends to employ various linguistic devices and politeness strategies in an effort to mitigate the face-threatening effect and thus make their requests more likely to be granted Writing requestive emails poses significant challenges to English learning students, who often lack the sophisticated pragmatic competence and linguistic awareness involved in successfully performing the speech act Students may experience additional difficulties because their emails are directed toward their professors who have a higher and more powerful institutional status The relationship between professor and student is institutionally asymmetrical, and as such students are expected to perform a great deal of mitigation, using “language that properly acknowledges their own lower institutional status and faculty’s higher institutional status” (Biesenbach-Lucas 2007:61) Such power-asymmetrical situations tend to be more pragmatically demanding and complex and thus require a higher level of pragmatic proficiency (Economidou-Kogetsidis 2008) However, Korean university students, who are often left without explicit instructions or prior experience of writing English emails to professors, may not be familiar with how to organize and encode their email messages in a way that is congruent with their institutional status Despite Korean students’ increasing need to write academic English emails, student-to-faculty email writing has been largely neglected both in research and English education (Shim 2013) This study, therefore, explores how Korean university students perform the requestive speech act in their emails toward foreign professors The following research questions guided this study: 1) What kinds of request strategies Korean univ ersity students use in Requests in Student-to-Professor Emails of Korean EFL Students 173 English academic emails? 2) What kinds of lexical/phrasal and syntactic modifications students employ in academic emails? 3) Does the students’ choice of request strategies and internal modifiers vary across request types? Research Background 2.1 Politeness Theory and the Request Speech Act The theoretical foundation of ‘politeness’ can be drawn from Brown and Levinson’s (1987) work Brown and Levinson, drawing on the notion of face, illustrate how politeness functions in language interaction According to their framework, people are prompted to interact with one another in a way to save positive face (“the positive and consistent image people have of themselves, and their desire for approval”) or negative face (“the basic claim to territories, personal preserves, and rights to non-distraction”) of one another (Brown and Levinson 1987:61) From the view of the politeness theory, a request is a particularly notable speech act because it includes face-threatening potential (Brown and Levinson 1987) and therefore requires the use of redressive actions to alleviate the potentially negative effects Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper (1989:11-12) pointed out the nature of request as follows Requests are face-threatening by definition: hearers can interpret requests as intrusive impingements on freedom of action, or even as a show in the exercise of power; speakers may hesitate to make the request for fear of exposing a need or risking the hearer’s loss of face The abundance of linguistic options available for requesting behavior testifies to the social intricacies associated with choice in mode of performance Due to its prevalent use in everyday interaction and the linguistic complexity of its realization, request, as a speech act, has been extensively 174 Young-Sook Shim studied in interlanguage pragmatics (Economidou-Kogetsidis 2008, Roever 2011) A great deal of interlanguage pragmatic research has focused on how L2 learners produce requests in their second/foreign language and how their performances differ from those of native speakers Much of the research is based on the Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Patterns (henceforth, CCSARP) conducted by Blum-Kulka et al (1989) The CCSARP is a large-scale project that established the similarities and differences between native and non-native speakers’ patterns across languages in request and apology speech acts The CCSARP instigated a robust discussion and produced considerable research; their coding schemes provided a useful framework for analyzing requests in numerous studies (Biesenbach-Lucas 2006, 2007, Blum-Kulka and House 1989, Economidou-Kogetsidis 2008, 2011, Hendricks 2010, Yang 2001, Zhu 2012), often with the original categories adapted or modified for each study’s data set The majority of the studies adopting the CCSARP framework typically segment request utterances into request strategies, internal modifications, and external modifications Request strategies, ranging from direct requests (e.g., Imperatives and Want Statements) to conventionally and non-conventionally indirect requests, are employed to formulate a request head act, the core of the request sequence In addition to request strategies, the speaker may use various internal modifiers Internal modifiers are defined as “elements within the request utterance proper (linked to the head act), the presence of which is not essential for the utterance to be potentially understood as a request” (Blum-Kulka 1989:60) Such modifiers may act either as downgraders, which mitigate the requestive force, or as upgraders, which intensify the coerciveness of a request (Blum-Kulka 1989) Internal modifiers are further classified into two types: syntactic modifiers, such as conditional, past tense, and progressive aspect; and lexical/phrasal modifiers, including both downgraders (e.g., maybe, just) and upgraders (e.g., as soon as possible) please, Another type of modification that softens or aggravates the request act is an external modification (also called supportive moves) Unlike internal modifiers, external modifiers take place outside of the head act of the request and generally include justifications and an imposition acknowledgment for the request The present study examined request strategies and internal Requests in Student-to-Professor Emails of Korean EFL Students 175 modification, but external modification was beyond the scope of the study The speaker chooses from a range of request strategies and modifiers to vary the level of politeness relative to social and situational variables Brown and Levinson (1987) claim that the degree of politeness is primarily determined by three factors: social distance between speaker and hearer; power difference between speaker and hearer; and the imposition of the request on the hearer According to Brown and Levinson’s argument, the greater the power, social distance, and imposition involved, the higher level of mitigation should be expected by the speaker What is particularly interesting from the perspective of interlanguage pragmatics is that assessments of power difference, social distance, and imposition vary cross-culturally Additionally, the ways that these factors determine the amount of facework and mitigation required in communication is also subject to cultural variation (Brown and Levinson 1987, Hendriks 2010) As a result, for non-native speakers (NNSs), it may be significantly challenging to establish the appropriate level of politeness and accordingly employ mitigating devices in the target language 2.2 Academic Requestive Email Due to the institutional power difference between student and professor, students’ requests toward their professors are usually “characterized by higher formality, avoidance of imperative requests (preference for conventional indirectness instead), a fairly high level of mitigation and acknowledgement of the imposition involved” (Economidou-Kogetsidis 2011:3194) However, NNSs, who are not often equipped with adequate linguistic and pragmatic options at their disposal, often fail to attain the expected level of politeness in composing status-unequal emails In an attempt to address NNSs’ request performances in academic settings, several studies examined the request realizations in ESL/EFL students’ emails toward their professors Hartford and Bardovi-Harlig (1996) analyzed requestive email messages of NS and NNS graduate students at an American university The results showed that the NNSs used fewer downgraders, more often expressed personal time needs, and less often acknowledged imposition 176 Young-Sook Shim on the faculty than the NSs Chang and Hsu (1998) compared requestive emails written by Chinese-speaking ESL and NS graduate students This study, drawing on the CCSARP coding schemes, found that NNS students frequently employed direct strategies such as Want Statements (e.g, I want you ) and Imperatives (e.g., Please tell me ) while NS students mostly used Query Preparatory (e.g., Could/Would you ) In a study examining email messages that a Taiwanese ESL graduate student wrote over two and a half years, Chen (2006) found that the student’s emails showed changes over time For example, the student contained fewer Want Statements and more Query Preparatory forms in her later requestive emails than in her earlier ones Biesenbach-Lucas (2007), using modified CCSARP categories, analyzed three types of requests (requests for appointments, requests for feedback, and requests for extensions, ordering in increasing imposition) in academic emails of NS and NNS graduate students Regarding syntactic modifiers, the NSs used the past tense (e.g., Could you instead of Can you ) in appointment requests and embedded forms (e.g., I was wondering if ) in extension requests much more frequently than the NNSs Of the lexical modifiers, the marker please was used much more frequently by the NNSs than by the NSs in requests for feedback and extensions The NSs, on the other hand, showed a preference for subjectivizers (e.g., I wonder, I hope, I think), particularly in extension requests Economidou-Kogetsidis (2011) examined NNS undergraduate and graduate students in an English-medium university in Greece The NNSs used a significantly higher number of direct strategies than conventionally indirect ones, particularly in their e-requests for information With regard to internal modification, the results indicated that a number of email requests (40.2%) did not use any lexical/phrasal modifiers The most frequently used downgrader was the marker please, as observed in other studies (Biesenbach-Lucas 2007, Yang 2001), with other modifiers used infrequently Only a few studies have explored academic emails in the Korean EFL context With a focus on internal modifiers, Yang (2001) compared requestive emails written by Korean NNSs and American NSs for a hypothetical Requests in Student-to-Professor Emails of Korean EFL Students 177 academic situation (asking a professor to write a recommendation letter) In the study, the NSs used mitigators much more frequently than the NNSs (almost 2.5 times more) In addition, the NSs modified their requests with tense/aspect downgraders much more frequently than the NNSs (22% vs 3%), while the NNSs used the politeness marker please much more frequently than the NSs (23% vs 1%) In an analysis of email messages that NSs and NNSs wrote for hypothetical academic request situations, Shim (2013) also confirmed Korean NNS students’ preference for direct request strategies such as Want Statements, Imperatives, and Direct Questions Although the above research contributed to enhancing our understanding of NNS requests in academic emails, some areas are still understudied First, while much of the previous research has been conducted with ESL students (e.g., Biesenbach-Lucas 2006, 2007, Chang and Hsu 1998, Chen 2006, Hartford and Bardovi-Harlig 1996), research focusing on EFL students is largely lacking Presumably, ESL students approximate NSs’ language use to a greater extent than EFL students because ESL students may be better acquainted with the conventions and norms of academic email from their own experiences of writing emails in their daily school lives Therefore, the findings reported in the previous studies may not fully represent EFL students’ performance of e-requests In many higher learning institutions today, EFL students, as well as ESL students, are often faced with occasions where they need to write English emails (Economidou-Kogetsidis 2011) Further research with EFL students will provide useful insights for English learners in many parts of the world Second, while the majority of studies examined graduate student e-requests (e.g., Biesenbach-Lucas 2007, Chang and Hsu 1998, Chen 2006, Hartford and Bardovi-Harlig 1996, Suh 2007), the undergraduate student population has been underrepresented Understandably, the content and types of requests may vary across the two different student populations Additionally, the social distance that graduate students perceive toward their professors may be different from that of undergraduate students Further research analyzing undergraduate students' emails would portray a more comprehensive picture of students' requestive behaviors Third, research studies on academic requestive emails tend to consider all 178 Young-Sook Shim types of requests indiscriminately and put them into a single category Exceptions to this categorization are Biesenbach-Lucas (2007) (requests for appointments, requests for feedback, and requests for extensions) and Economidou-Kogetsidis (2011) (requests for action and requests for information) The results of these studies showed that request strategies and modifiers were employed in different frequencies relative to the request types More research is needed to investigate academic e-requests across different request types In an effort to address these underrepresented areas, the present study aims to explore academic email writing of Korean EFL undergraduate students with a focus on their use of request strategies and internal modifiers across different request types Method 3.1 Participants and Data Collection The data set is comprised of 150 emails sent by undergraduate students to six non-Korean English professors at a mid-size university located in the Gyeonggi-do Province of Korea All of the six professors were teaching first-year English courses at the time of data collection The professors were all native speakers of English (three from the United States, two from Canada, and one from South Africa) Five of the professors were female, and one was male On average, they had 4.8 years of teaching experience in Korea, ranging from to years The professors consented to supply email messages that they received in the semester The professors were informed that the email messages would be used only for research purposes and that any information that might reveal personal information would be deleted or altered (e.g., names of the senders and the recipients; and course titles) The total of 256 messages collected initially covered a range of communication topics and functional purposes because the professors were not specifically asked to send only requestive emails For the research focus of the present study, all of the messages were Requests in Student-to-Professor Emails of Korean EFL Students 179 reviewed, and then 150 messages whose main communication purpose was requestive in nature were separated from the original data set Due to the data collection method, it was unlikely that personal information about each sender was fully identified The professors had difficulties recalling each sender's personal information such as the student's academic department and school year unless the student explicitly identified him- or herself in the message Nevertheless, some general information about the students could be obtained from the professors It was presumed that most of the email senders were freshmen students because the emails that the professors received were mostly from the students who were taking freshmen-level English courses In addition, according to what the professors said, the students were enrolled for various academic areas, such as engineering, natural science, humanities, social science, and fine arts It could also be inferred from the language used in the email messages, as well as the professors’ accounts, that English proficiency of these students varied from high beginning to low intermediate with only a few exceptions of students with higher proficiency 3.2 Analysis Procedure Of the 150 requestive emails, 145 messages were classified into five different request types: (1) requests for test results; (2) requests for class-related information (e.g., information about the format or content of class activities and assignments, upcoming test procedures, and other academic matters); (3) requests for feedback on their work; (4) requests for a change or revision to a grade; and (5) requests for meeting (e.g., setting a time for an advisory appointment or a make-up exam) The remaining five messages, which did not correspond to any of these categories, were tagged as ‘others.’ Some students’ messages contained multiple requests (e.g., a request for feedback and a request for test results) in a single message In such a case, the researcher classified the email message into a request type that the researcher deemed primary; then subsequent data analysis focused on sentences only related to the particular type of request The request types and the number of messages are summarized in Table 180 Young-Sook Shim Request Types Request Request Request Request Request Others for for for for for Request Types test results class-related information feedback grade change/revision meeting Total Number 48 38 23 21 15 150 Percentage 32% 25.4% 15.3% 14% 10% 3.3% 100% As Table indicates, the most commonly found request type was requests for test results (32%); then requests for class-related information (25.4%), requests for feedback (15.3%), requests for grade change/revision (14%), and requests for meeting (10%), in order of decreasing frequency The email was analyzed using a modified coding scheme that drew on the CCASRP (Blum-Kulka et al 1989) and other studies (Biesenbach-Lucas 2007, Economidou-Kogetsidis 2011, Zhu 2012) that adapted the original CCSARP for their email data The first step involved identifying the request head acts within each message Multiple request head acts were frequently identified in a single message The request head acts were then classified into the request strategies presented in Table Request Strategies Directness Level Direct Convention-ally indirect Hints Request Strategies Imperatives Performatives Want Statements Direct Questions Need Statements Expectation Statements Pre-decided Statements Query Preparatory (ability, willingness, permission) Strong/Mild Hints Examples Please give me feedback on my paper I have to ask for changing my grade I want to know my test score When you have time? I need more time for the assignment I hope you give me a chance I will submit my assignment tomorrow Can/could … /Would you mind … I would appreciate it if … I have trouble understanding the topic The next step was to identify and categorize lexical/phrasal and syntactic modifiers used within each head act Those internal modifiers were considered Requests in Student-to-Professor Emails of Korean EFL Students 181 to mitigate or aggravate the requestive force It should be noted that multiple modifiers were employed for a single request head act in some cases For example, in a request such as I am wondering if you can possibly give me feedback on my paper, three internal modifiers can be identified: one lexical modifier (possibly, a downtoner) and two syntactic modifiers (progressive aspect and if-clause) The types of lexical/phrasal and syntactic modifiers are presented in Table and Table respectively Lexical/Phrasal Modifiers Types of Modifiers Downgraders Marker please Consultative Devices please you think, is it/would it be possible, is it all right Downtoners possibly, maybe, perhaps Understaters a little, sort of, just Hedges some, any, somehow Subjectivizers Upgraders Examples Intensifier Time intensifier I think/suppose, I wonder, I’m afraid I really need a higher mark Reply to me as soon as possible Syntactic Modifiers Types of Modifiers Past Tense Progressive Aspect If-Clause Examples I wanted to know / Could you / I would like to I am hoping / I was wondering I would appreciate if you could / I wonder if you give Results and Discussion 4.1 Request Strategies As Table indicates, 295 head acts were identified in the 150 requestive email messages, which suggests that 1.3 head acts on average were used in each email message The number of head acts per message varied, not greatly 182 Young-Sook Shim though, across the request types With the category others set aside (due to the negligibly small number of instances for that category), an email requesting a grade change or revision contained the highest number of head acts per message (2.4), while an email requesting test results included the lowest number of head acts (1.5) Frequency of Request Head Acts across Request Types Request Types Request for test results Requests for information Requests for feedback Requests for grade change/revision Request for meeting Others Total Freq of Messages 48 38 23 21 15 150 Freq of Head Acts 73 81 43 50 32 16 295 Freq of Head Acts per Message 1.5 2.1 1.9 2.4 2.1 3.2 1.3 A plausible explanation for the different numbers of head acts per message is that the number of request acts might be associated with the degree of the request imposition That is, the greater imposition that the speaker perceives, the more request acts he or she would make It is generally assumed that requesting a grade change/revision involves a higher degree of imposition than simply requesting test results Based on that assumption, therefore, one can suppose that the high degree of imposition involved in grade change/revision requests was responsible for the higher number of head acts used in that particular request type However, further research is needed in order to more clearly establish the relationship between the number of head acts and the degree of imposition because it is difficult to determine the relative degree of imposition of each request type category in the present study The analysis of request strategies used in the email messages revealed that the students heavily relied on direct strategies (73%) rather than indirect ones (27%), as presented in Table Of the direct strategies, the one most frequently used was Imperatives (25%), followed by Want Statements (24%) and Direct Questions (15%) Requests in Student-to-Professor Emails of Korean EFL Students 183 Distribution of Request Strategies across Request Types (%) Request Strategies Direct Imperatives Test Informaresults tion 18 (25) 14 (17) Performatives Want Statements Grade Meeting Others Total 15 (35) 16 (32) (25) (25) 75 (25) (3) (6) (1) (5) (11) (12) 10 (20) (28) (6) 72 (24) Direct Questions 28 (35) (19) (6) (9) (13) 44 (15) Need Statements (1) (2) (2) (6) (1) Expectation Statements (1) (2) (6) (13) (3) Pre-decided Statements (3) (2) 26 (32) 10 (23) Convl Indirect Query Preparatory Hints Strong /Mild Hints Total Feedback 38 (52) 17 (23) (6) (9) 12 (24) (19) (10) 73 81 43 50 32 (2) (19) 74 (25) (13) (2) 16 295 The request utterances below are examples of the four most frequently used strategies in the email data (1) Answer my question (Imperative) Please contact me as soon as possible (Imperative) (2) Would you mind checking this script? (Query Preparatory) I will be grateful if you confirm my grade (Query Preparatory) (3) Do we have to memorize questions for topic 2~4? (Direct Question) When are you free? (Direct Question) (4) I want to know my final exam score (Want Statement) I want to receive paper which added your comment (Want Statement) The findings of the present study regarding the Korean NNSs’ preference for direct strategies confirms what has been reported in other studies on student-to-faculty email For example, Economidou-Kogetsidis (2011) found that 184 Young-Sook Shim NNS students preferred direct strategies to conventionally indirect strategies (63.78% vs 32.28%) with Imperatives, Direct Questions, and Want Statements being most widely used In Biesenbach-Lucas (2002), Chen (2006), and Suh (2007) studies, they similarly found that NNSs tended to favor direct strategies Conventionally-indirect request strategies are generally considered more polite and appropriate, particularly when requests are directed toward authority figures like professors The predominant use of direct strategies observed in the students’ emails of this study, therefore, indicates that their requests may fail to achieve an appropriate level of politeness and as a result may provide the faculty with not-so-good impressions of the sender To ensure an appropriate politeness level, some of the direct requests presented in (1), (3), and (4) could have been linguistically realized as in the following by means of conventionally indirect strategies (5) Answer my question → I would appreciate it if you could answer my question (6) I want to know my final exam score → Could I know my final exam score? (7) When are you free? → Could you let me know when you are free? The students’ preference for direct strategies was a general tendency observed across the request types The students, however, also showed variation in employing the subcategories of the direct strategies for each request type As shown in Table 6, Want Statements were far more frequently used in the requests for test results (52%) while Direct Questions were preferred in the requests for information (35%) The following are excerpts from the email data (italics added) Requests in Student-to-Professor Emails of Korean EFL Students 185 (8) Hi~ I’m Minsu I want to know my exam grade I’m not good, typing in english; See you in friday.~ bye (9) Hi teacher it’s Jenny I have some questions about Riding Home Work P 355 & P 357 are homework? Bye It seems that both the request types involve a relatively low level of imposition because professors are asked to provide readily available information For this reason, the unusually high percentage of Want Statements in test result requests and of Direct Questions in information requests are more likely attributed to the request contents, rather than to the imposition levels How request contents triggers students’ choice of specific strategies calls for further attention in academic email research 4.2 Lexical/Phrasal Modification Table summarizes the quantitative analysis of lexical/phrasal downgraders and upgraders in the students’ emails One of the most intriguing findings regarding lexical/phrasal modification might be that the majority of the head acts (60%) were not modified by any lexical/phrasal downgraders Distribution of Lexical/Phrasal Modifiers across Request Types (%) Downgrader Modifiers Test results Information Feedback Grade Meeting Others Total Zero Marking 53 (73) 54 (64) 24 (55) 21 (40) 21 (60) (44) 180 (60) Marker please 17 (23) 16 (19) 14 (32) 18 (34) (26) (25) 78 (26) (6) (2) Consultative Device (3) (2) 186 Young-Sook Shim (2) Downtoner Upgrader Understater (1) Hedge (1) (1) Subjectivizer (5) Intensifier (1) Time intensifier Total (2) (3) (1) (3) (1) (1) (2) (5) (15) (3) (4) (13) 17 (6) (13) (2) (1) (5) (5) (4) (3) (6) 11 (4) 73 85 44 53 35 16 306* Note: *The total number presented in this table (306) is higher than the total number of head acts (295) because in a few cases more than two lexical/phrasal modifiers were used in one head act Previous research has yielded similar findings Economidou-Kogetsidis (2011) found that a large portion of EFL students’ emails (40.2%) did not contain lexical/phrasal downgraders In Yang’s (2001) study, 24% of Korean EFL students’ requests were not lexically modified, while only one zero-marking case was found in NS data Students’ requests with insufficient mitigation might be particularly problematic because it is generally expected that student-to-faculty requestive emails should involve a fairly high level of mitigation In fact, Hendricks (2010) found that the recipients tended to evaluate negatively request emails that were not sufficiently mitigated with lexical modifiers In a similar vein, Economidou-Kogetsidis (2011) indicated that the lack of lexical modifiers “may cause pragmatic failure by adding a coercive tone to these emails” (p 3207) Another important finding is that the marker please was by far the most commonly used modifier in the student emails The politeness marker was used to modify 26% of the total request acts, but when the data is limited to the head acts that contained any of the six lexical/phrasal downgraders presented in Table 7, 71% of the head acts were modified by please with the remaining downgraders used very sparingly Again, this finding is in line with many other studies (e.g., Biesenbach-Lucas 2007, Economidou-Kogetsidis Requests in Student-to-Professor Emails of Korean EFL Students 187 2011, Yang 2001) that reported NNSs’ frequent use of the marker please as a mitigating device For NNS’s prevalent use of the marker please, Yang (2001:56) noted that “please is a clear and easily acquired politeness device because it requires just a lexical addition to a request sentence.” An interesting observation regarding the use of please is that while the marker please was used in the Query Preparatory (e.g., Could you please ~?) structures only seven times, it was used in most cases (71 out of 78) in the ‘please+imperative / imperative+please’ structure (e.g., Please give me feedback) The use of imperatives by students is institutionally inappropriate in the academic setting and likely puts them seriously out-of-status (Bloch 2002, Hartford and Bardovi-Harlig 1996) As Economidou-Kogetsidis (2011:3206) argued, “the use the imperative made the request sound like an instruction, an order or a demand and created the assumption that the lecturer will comply.” Importantly, the marker please “does not serve as a strong enough mitigator to soften the force of the imperative” (Hartford and Bardovi-Harlig 1996:59) Noticing the insignificant mitigating effect of the marker please in NNSs’ emails, Biesenbach-Lucas (2007:70) suggested that NNSs might “use please indiscriminately as an illocutionary force indicator rather than a mitigating politeness devices.” The following excerpts from the email data illustrate the inappropriateness of using please in imperatives in academic emails (italics added) (10) Hello~ This is my interview script Please recommend tips and correct the grammar~ (11) Hi, Jenny, Please send me an email about my midterm exam score See you next class~ bye*^^*ㅎㅎ It is important to note that, aside from the 180 zero-marking head acts as well as the 71 imperative head acts modified with please, only 39 head acts (12.7%) out of 306 were lexically modified to mitigate the requestive force Indeed, most of the head acts lacked sufficient mitigation Additionally, some 188 Young-Sook Shim requests (5.2%) contained upgraders, which increased the requestive force as in the examples below (italics added) (12) Deadline is just coming up and I not have much time So please make it quick (13) Please inform me my rank I really want to get A+ An interesting finding was obtained in a further analysis of lexical/phrasal modifications across the request types The percentage of zero-marking head acts was highest in requests for test results (73%) and lowest in requests for grade change/revision (40%) In other words, requests for grade change/revision were most frequently modified with lexical/phrasal mitigators while requests for test results were least frequently modified A possible explanation may lie in the different levels of imposition perceived by the students for the two types of requests Not unexpectedly, the students might have perceived the grade-related requests as much more face-threatening and consequently strived to mitigate the requests to a greater extent than they did in requests for test results 4.3 Syntactic Modification Table shows the syntactic modifiers employed in the students’ emails The results indicate that the students modified only 20% of the request head acts by adding syntactic politeness devices The students used the past tense (e.g., Could you …, I wanted to …) most frequently, and the use of the other two syntactic modifiers was kept to minimum Furthermore, no noticeable difference was found in the use of syntactic modifiers across the request types Distribution of Syntactic Modifiers across Request Types (%) Modifiers Test Results Information Feedback Grade Time Others Total Zero Marking 60 (81.1) 67 (80.7) 35 (79.5) 38 (71.7) 27 (84.4) 12 (75) 239 (79.1) Requests in Student-to-Professor Emails of Korean EFL Students 189 Past Tense 12 (16.2) 10 (12) (9.1) Progressive Aspect 10 (18.9) (12.5) (3.8) If-Clause (2.7) (7.2) (11.4) (5.7) (3.1) Total 74 83 44 53 32 (18.8) 43 (14.2) (6.3) (1) 17 (5.6) 16 302* Note: *The total number presented in this table (302) is higher than the total number of head acts (295) because in a few cases more than two syntactic modifiers were used in one head act Biesenbach-Lucas (2007) and Yang (2001) observed that NSs tended to use syntactic modifiers more frequently and adroitly than NNSs The following examples are NS student requests that appeared in other studies; such syntactically modified requests, however, were rarely found in the data of the present study (italics added) (14) Could I meet with you sometime this week? (Biesenbach-Lucas 2011, p 71) (15) I was hoping you could provide me with a recommendation letter (Yang 2001, p 58) (16) I was wondering if I could make appointment with you (Biesenbach-Lucas 2011, p 72) It is interesting that the syntactic elements featured in the above examples (i.e., the past tense, the progressive aspect, and if-clause) are ones learned in the early stages of English learning in the Korean EFL context (mostly at the elementary and middle school level) A logical question then arises —why did the Korean university students in this study rarely use these syntactic devices? It seemed that the students were not well aware of the pragmatic function of the syntactic elements although they knew the grammatical usages of them Considering the low-input EFL context, it might be difficult for Korean students to acquire the pragmatic ability to use such syntactic devices to enhance the politeness level of their messages and mitigate the coercive forces of a request, unless they are provided with explicit instructions (Yang 2001) 190 Young-Sook Shim Conclusion The present study investigated request strategies and downgrading devices that Korean university students employed in their academic emails toward their professors The important findings are summarized in the following First, the students tended to use direct strategies more frequently than conventionally indirect ones Among the direct strategies, Imperatives, Want Statements, and Direct Questions were most widely used Second, the students’ use of lexical/phrasal downgraders was limited in number and type The majority of the request head acts were bare of lexical/phrasal modifiers Among the modifiers examined, the marker please (primarily in the ‘please+imperative’ structure) was more frequently used than any other modifier, but its mitigating force was deemed insignificant A small number of emails contained upgraders that possibly increased the coercive effect Third, the students did not modify their requests syntactically in most cases Of the syntactic devices investigated, only the past tense was employed to some extent while the others were rarely used Fourth, in general, the use of request strategies and internal modifications did not vary to any significant extent across the request types It should be noted, however, that the higher number of request head acts and the more frequent use of lexical/phrasal downgraders were observed in grade change or revision requests This finding may suggest that the students perceived that request type particularly face-threatening and therefore employed more request utterances and mitigating devices Due to insufficient evidence, however, such speculation warrants further investigation In sum, the students largely resorted to direct strategies and inadequately mitigated their requests lexically and syntactically in their academic email requests This result indicates that the university students largely lacked linguistic flexibility and politeness strategies to make an appropriate and polite e-request Because they not possess sufficient knowledge and resources, additional time allowed to compose and revise their email messages does not seem particularly helpful (Biesenbach-Lucas 2007) The students’ lack of pragmatic awareness and abilities may also help Requests in Student-to-Professor Emails of Korean EFL Students 191 explain the small variations (probably with the exception of requests for grade change/revision) found in their use of request strategies and internal modifications across the request types Unlike the present study, Biesenbach-Lucas (2007) found that both NS and NNS participants employed varied levels of directness and downgraders in accordance with request types (requests for appointments, requests for feedback, and requests for extensions) This finding may be attributed to the high level of English proficiency of the advanced-level participants (both NS and NNS were graduate students enrolling in an American university) in Biesenbach-Lucas’ study Perhaps, unlike the graduate students, the low-level students of the present study could only retrieve a limited number of structures (e.g., ‘ please+imperative’ and Want Statements) to formulate requests indiscriminately, regardless of the request topics and imposition levels involved Importantly, it is difficult to expect EFL university students to naturally acquire and develop the ability to construct appropriate academic emails because authentic models are rarely available in natural settings Therefore, explicit instructions may play an important role in helping students perform the request speech act with an appropriate level of politeness Even a few sessions of instructions can contribute to improving students’ ability to write polite request emails because the formulae used for academic requests are mostly standardized In fact, Biesenbach-Lucas (2007) illustrated a series of instructional activities, which can be completed in a short period of time, that involve discovering and raising meta-pragmatics awareness The activities Biesenbach-Lucas suggested include initial consciousness-raising tasks (in which the students discuss the reasons for pragmatic success and failure in "good" and "bad" samples of requestive emails), tasks of analyzing the components and genre-specific elements in each email message, meta-linguistic and meta-pragmatic tasks of examining actual request language, and finally email writing practice from more controlled fill-in activities to actual email writing The present study has some limitations First, no NS data was included for comparisons with the NNS data, although the findings were discussed to some extent in reference to NS data of other studies NS-NNS comparisons would have provided clearer evidence about NNSs’ interlanguage pragmatic development Second, various factors that can potentially affect how students 192 Young-Sook Shim compose their email messages remain unexamined A further investigation of factors such as proficiency level, linguistic and pragmatic transfer, and perceived social distance between individual students and their professors could expand our understanding of the question at issue A further limitation of the present study concerns the fact that it only examined request head acts and internal modifications During the review of the email data, it was observed that the students employed various devices to make their email requests more polite and thus more acceptable to their professors For example, many of the email messages contained emoticons, small talk, greetings/closings, and complements on the professors’ teaching abilities or the class, which were apparently used with the intention of mitigating the requestive force (their actual effects can be different though) Those devices may be more readily available options for students than lexical or syntactic modifiers because such elements that are external to request head acts appear “more explicit in their intended politeness function” (Economidou-Kogetsidis 2011:3207) and tend to be syntactically less demanding Further research that extends the research focus to the whole email message may provide a more complete picture of students’ speech act performance in academic requestive emails References Biesenbach-Lucas, S 2006 Making requests in e-mail: Do cyber-consultations entail directness? Toward conventions in a new medium Bardovi-Harlig, K., J C Félix-Brasdefer, and A S Omar (eds.) Pragmatics and language learning, vol 11, 81-107 Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press Biesenbach-Lucas, S 2007 Students writing emails to faculty: An examination of e-politeness among native and non-native speakers of English Language Learning & Technology 11.2, 59-81 Bloch, J 2002 Student/teacher interaction via e-mail: The social context of Internet discourse Journal of Second Language Writing 11.2, 117-134 Blum-Kulka, S 1989 Playing it safe: The role of conventionality in indirectness Blum-Kulka, S., J House, and G Kasper (eds.) Requests in Student-to-Professor Emails of Korean EFL Students 193 Cross-cultural pragmatic: Requests and apologies, 37-70 Norwood, NJ: Ablex Blum-Kulka, S and J House 1989 Cross-cultural and situational variation in requesting behavior Blum-Kulka, S., J House, and G Kasper (eds.) Cross-cultural pragmatic: Requests and apologies, 123-154 Norwood, NJ: Ablex Blum-Kulka, S., J House, and G Kasper 1989 The CCSARP coding manual Blum-Kulka, S., J House, and G Kasper (eds.) Cross-cultural pragmatic: Requests and apologies, 273-294 Norwood, NJ: Ablex Brown, P and S Levinson 1987 Politeness: Some universals in language usage Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press Chang, Y-Y and Y-P Hsu 1998 Requests on e-mail: A cross-cultural comparison RELC Journal 29.2, 121-151 Chen, C-F E 2006 The development of e-mail literacy: From writing to peers to writing to authority figures Language Learning & Technology 10.2, 35-55 Economidou-Kogetsidis, M 2008 Internal and external mitigation in interlanguage request production: The case of Greek learners of English Journal of Politeness Research 4, 111-138 Economidou-Kogetsidis, M 2011 “Please answer me as soon as possible”: Pragmatic failure in non-native speakers’ e-mail requests to faculty Journal of Pragmatics 43, 3193-3215 Hartford, B S and K Bardovi-Harlig 1996 “At your earliest convenience”: A study of written student requests to faculty Bouton, L F (ed.) Pragmatics and language learning (v 7), 55-69 Urbana-Champaign: Division of English as an International Language, University of Illinois Hendriks, B 2010 An experimental study of native speaker perceptions of non-native request modification in e-mails in English Intercultural Pragmatics 7.2, 221-255 Kim, K-H 2013 An analysis of request speech act in the emails by Korean university students Master's thesis Hanyang University Roever, C 2011 Testing of second language pragmatics: Past and future Language Testing 28.4, 463-481 Shim, Y-S 2013 Student-to-faculty emails: Comparison between Korean EFL students and native English speakers Korean Journal of Applied Linguistics 29.4, 223-249 Suh, J-S 2007 A study of comparing speech act data from two differing data-gathering instruments English Language & Literature Teaching 13.3, 194 Young-Sook Shim 77-97 Yang, E-M 2001 The use of downgraders by Korean English speakers and American English native speakers in requestive e-mail English Language & Literature Teaching 7.1, 51-66 Zhu, W 2012 Polite requestive strategies in emails: An investigation of pragmatic competence of Chinese EFL learners RELC Journal 43.2, 217-238 Department of English Language and Culture The Catholic University of Korea 43 Jibong-ro, Wonmi-gu, Bucheon-si Gyeonggi-do, 420-743, Korea +82-2-2164-4456, yshim@catholic.ac.kr Received: October 20, 2013 Reviewed: December 11, 2013 Accepted: December 12, 2013 ... Student-to-Professor Emails of Korean EFL Students 173 English academic emails? 2) What kinds of lexical/phrasal and syntactic modifications students employ in academic emails? 3) Does the students? ?? choice of. .. in their emails toward foreign professors The following research questions guided this study: 1) What kinds of request strategies Korean univ ersity students use in Requests in Student-to-Professor... (2007), using modified CCSARP categories, analyzed three types of requests (requests for appointments, requests for feedback, and requests for extensions, ordering in increasing imposition) in academic