The Problem

 

Although negotiation via email takes place every day between students and their supervisors/lecturers, the underlying processes of these negotiations have been largely neglected in linguistic literature to date. Important gaps still remain in relation to our understanding of the nature of academic email negotiations, especially as far as culture, gender and power are concerned. This project adopts the perspective that in order to analyse negotiation interactions, two dimensions need to be considered: the discourse structure level, which involves negotiation behaviour/moves and the language use level, which concerns linguistic features and politeness strategies. 

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Objective

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Based on the analysis of Saudi and Australian students’ email negotiation strategies when approaching a prospective PhD supervisor, this study aims at understanding politeness conventions in persuasive/ rhetorical discourse and academic negotiation (Hartford and Bardovi‐Harlig 1992, Biesenbach-Lucas and Weasenforth 2001) across cultures.  The analysis is guided by Herring’s (2004) Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA) approach.

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Findings

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Initial findings from 100 Saudi emails and 15 (native-English speaking) Australian emails suggest that there were two major underlying strategies behind each cultural group’s persuasive/polite discourse: the Saudi students were found to be concerned with portraying the self as important (positive politeness), whereas the Australian students prioritized showing a professional face (negative politeness).  These findings will be presented, and the influence of gender on the negotiation styles will also be discussed.

 

References:

Biesenbach-Lucas, S. and D. Weasenforth (2001). "E-mail and word processing in the ESL classroom: How the medium affects the message."          

Hartford, B. S. and K. Bardovi‐Harlig (1992). "Closing the conversation: Evidence from the academic advising session." Discourse Processes 15(1): 93-116.  

Herring, S. C. (2004). Computer-mediated discourse analysis: An approach to researching online behavior. In S. A. Barab, R. Kling, & J. H. Gray (Eds.), Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning (pp. 338-376). New York: Cambridge University Press. Preprint: http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/cmda.pdf