earticle

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This study investigates emails sent by Asian ESL students to their instructor in an American university. It examines how Asian ESL students conduct speech acts of request and apology in email communication to their instructor. The data used for this study are actual emails that were received by an ESL teacher at a university in the Midwestern U.S. The data were compared with emails of English native speakers who were taking a Korean class at the time of this study at the same university. The request and apology speech acts, which are commonly found in the emails, were analyzed in terms of degree of directness, and internal and external modification using CCSARP coding manual (Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989). Results show that Asian ESL students are more direct in making requests and less formal in making apologies than English native speakers. It appears that ESL students are simply depending on colloquial expressions, not understanding the characteristics of written communication. This study suggests that ESL students can get benefits from explicit instruction on typical emails between student and teacher in university settings.