Abstract
The Chapter aims to establish some focal points for further, more detailed investigation of e-mail communication between scholars using English as their lingua franca. On the basis of a corpus of approximately one thousand electronic letters the study highlights a number of intriguing features of this relatively new form of communication. Employing the concept of International University (Björkman 2011), the author makes an attempt to define and describe the community of language users whose main communicative channel comes in form of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). A significant factor contributing to the homogeneity of this idealised speech community is their professional background as employees of academic institutions, dealing with matters related to research, dissemination of scientific concepts and ideas and organisation of higher education. The language which is used in interactions between the members of the global scientific community is usually English. Given the characteristics of the group of users and the dominating communicative goals, it may be characterised as a peculiar form of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), in this particular case English for Academic Purposes (EAP). The research on Academic English has already accumulated bulky volumes and managed to produce detailed typologies of various genres, such as lectures, conference presentations, seminar discussions, office hours exchanges, research papers, book reviews, dissertations of all kinds, feedback comments on students’ work, and many others. Unquestionably, electronic letters exchanged between academics constitute a peculiar, albeit somewhat peripheral genre within broadly understood Academic English, which has been recognised a long time ago (Gains 1999: 81). The investigation, employing selective qualitative text analysis of the corpus, focuses on such issues as participant configurations (manifested mainly in the addresative forms used by writers), linguistic encoding of power relationships and social distance (connected with the issues pertaining to linguistic politeness) and metadiscursive elements in the interaction. Additionally, an attempt is made to pinpoint characteristic features of the English language used as a lingua franca in electronic mails, on the background of L1 English as used by native speakers. Finally, interesting examples of diversified, local uses of the English language by Polish native speakers are provided and contrasted with the forms employed in international communication within ELF paradigm, echoing the distinction between the local and the global variety of English proposed by Brutt-Griffler (2002: 174–176). In the final part of the paper the contexts shaping the formal and interactional characteristics of academic ELF are described in terms of a Self-Organising System (Gibbs 2005; 2011), followed by suggestions for further research.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Whenever real names were used in the corpus, they have been changed in order to protect the privacy of the authors.
References
Baron, N. S. (1998). Letters by phone or speech by other means: The linguistics of e-mail. Language and Communication, 18, 133–170.
Baron, N. S. (2000). Alphabet to email: How written English evolved and where it’s heading. London: Routledge.
Björkman, B. (2011). The pragmatics of English as a lingua franca in the international university: Introduction. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 923–925.
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brutt-Griffler, J. (2002). World English. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Bunz, U., & Cambell S. W. (2002). Accommodating politeness indicators in personal electronic mail messages. Paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers 3rd Annual Conference. Maastricht, The Netherlands.
Charles, M. (1996). Business negotiations: Interdependence between discourse and the business relationship. English for Specific Purposes, 15(1), 19–36.
Coleman, J. A. (2009). Multilingualism in contexts: The relativity of time and space. In W. Wiater & G. Videsott (Eds.), Migration und Mehrsprachigkeit (pp. 115–133). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Dudley-Evans, T., & St John, M. J. (1998). Developments in English for specific purposes: A multi-disciplinary approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gains, J. (1999). Electronic mail—a new style of communication or just a new medium? English for Specific Purposes, 18(1), 81–101.
Gibbs, R. W. (2005). Embodiment and cognitive science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gibbs, R. W. (2011). A dynamical, self-organized view of context for human action. A Plenary Paper presented at Cognition, Conduct and Communication Conference. Łódź, July 10, 2011.
Gimenez, J. C. (2000). Business e-mail communication: Some emerging tendencies in register. English for Specific Purposes, 19, 237–251.
Haberland, H. (1989). Whose English, nobody’s business. Journal of Pragmatics, 13, 927–938.
Haberland, H. (2011). Ownership and maintenance of a language in transnational use: Should we leave our lingua franca alone? Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 937–949.
Harris, R. (2007). Opinion. Times Higher Education Supplement, March 27: 12.
Hutchinson, T., & Waters, A. (1987). English for specific purposes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jenkins, J. (2011). Accommodating (to) the ELF in the international university. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 926–936.
Jensen, A. (2009). Discourse strategies in professional e-mail negotiation: A case study. English for Specific Purposes, 28, 4–18.
Kecskes, I. (2003). Situation-bound utterances in L1 and L2. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Lievrouw, L. A. (1990). Reconciling structure and process in the study of scholarly communication. In C. L. Borgman (Ed.), Scholarly communication and bibliometrics (pp. 59–69). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Ma, R. (1996). Computer-mediated conversations as a new dimension of intercultural communication between East Asian and North American college students. In S. C. Herring (Ed.), Computer-mediated communication: Linguistic, social and cross-cultural perspectives (pp. 173–185). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Moran, C., & Hawisher, G. E. (1998). The rhetorics and langugaes of electronic mail. In I. Snyder (Ed.), Page to screen: Taking literacy into the electronic era (pp. 80–101). London: Routledge.
Murphy, M., & Levy, M. (2006). Politeness in intercultural email communication: Australian and Korean perspectives. Journal of Intercultural Communication, 12, 1–12.
Nadler, J., & Shestowsky, D. (2006). Negotiation, information technology, and the problem of the faceless other. In L. L. Thompson (Ed.), Negotiation theory and research (pp. 145–172). New York: Psychology Press.
Price, D. J. (1963). Little science, big science. New York: Columbia University Press.
Price, D. J. (1986). Little science, big science (and beyond). New York: Columbia University Press.
Ross, D. N. (2001). Electronic communications: Do cultrual dimensions matter? American Business Review, 19(2), 75–81.
Saville-Troike, M. (1996). The ethnography of communication. In S. L. McKay & N. H. Hornberger (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and language teaching (pp. 351–382). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Widdowson, H. (1994). The ownership of English. TESOL Quarterly, 28(2), 377–389.
Zuccala, A. (2006). Modeling the invisible college. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(2), 152–168.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wojtaszek, A. (2014). Breaking the Rules and Searching for Standards in E-mail Exchanges Between Academics. In: Łyda, A., Warchał, K. (eds) Occupying Niches: Interculturality, Cross-culturality and Aculturality in Academic Research. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02526-1_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02526-1_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-02525-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-02526-1
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawEducation (R0)