Investigating Iranian University Students' Emails for Pragmatic Features

Regarding the important instructional role of email exchanges between teachers and students in institutional environments, this study was conducted as an attempt to examine particular pragmatic features in emails sent by Iranian university students to their professors during the academic year 2012. Following Biesenbach-Lucas (2005), and Chalack et al. (2010), the researchers aimed at investigating the pragmatic features of real examples of email messages from academic sources to find some clues as to how female and male Iranian students go about writing such messages, for what purposes, and with what strategies. More specifically, in this study, a corpus consisting of 145 student-initiated emails was analyzed in terms of the senders' use of communicative strategies and communicative topics by using both descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. While findings related to the first two posed research questions showed both similarities and differences compared to the most prominent works on this genre, the analysis also revealed some interesting points about the use of abbreviations by the senders and also their awareness of the medium they were using for contacting their instructors. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-YD