Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

The present study investigated e-mails written in English and Japanese based on four tasks with different levels of imposition by 13 native English speakers who were students of Japanese and had spent a year in Japan. The e-mails submitted were analysed from the aspect of politeness strategies.

Paper long abstract:

Previous studies of request e-mails have generally compared e-mails written by learners with those written by native speakers (Wang and Wen 2015, Dong 2015) or only dealt with e-mails written in the sender's native language (Li 2004, Otomo 2009). Thus, it is unclear to what extent e-mails written in the target language by foreign language learners reflect the e-mail customs of their mother tongue, as well as their own cultural and socio-pragmatic influences.

With this in mind, the present study investigated e-mails written by native English speakers who were students of Japanese and had spent a year in Japan. The 13 students were given four tasks with different levels of imposition and asked to write e-mails to imaginary teachers. The first two tasks required the participants to write in Japanese and the following two tasks, which were similar to the first tasks, were written in English. The e-mails submitted were analysed using the authors' own categorisation table based on Brown and Levinson's (B&L) (1987) "politeness strategies (PS)", as well as Li (2014) and Wang and Wen's (2015) categorisations.

The provisional results revealed that whilst "negative politeness strategies (NPS)" were more frequently used in the Japanese e-mails for the more imposed tasks, no statistically significant differences were observed between the Japanese and English e-mails for the less imposed tasks. Furthermore, in contrast to B&L's theory, the e-mails for the less imposed tasks generated more NPSs which suggests that the use of PS depends, not merely on the level of imposition, but also on more specific contexts where it may or may not be appropriate to shorten the psychological distance between the senders and the recipients.

This presentation will examine the characteristics of learners' use of PS, with examples, and on a basis of a questionnaire the participants also completed, their thoughts and awareness of the differences of PS between English and Japanese language request e-mails.