Dissenting emails in academia: The analysis of the micro- and macrostructure of Chinese university students’ emails to their lecturer in Spanish

David Rodríguez Velasco and María Cecilia Ainciburu
Queen Mary University of London | Universidad Antonio de Nebrija

This research studies a group of Chinese university students of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) and observes the macro- and microstructure of their emails and their pragmatic competence. In order to study the features and context adequacy of their communication, a corpus of 135 emails written by fourth-year students was analysed to identify the uses and preferences concerning subject lines and opening and closing moves, and to investigate the uses and functions of strategies related to disagreement in their communication to a faculty member. Our results have reflected the obstacles that the vast majority of students manifest in the use of Spanish when it comes to adequately achieving their communicative purpose in a given context. Data also proved that the emails analysed were inappropriate due to insufficient mitigation, lack of acknowledgement of the imposition involved and lack of status-congruent language.

Publication history

Date received: 3 November 2022

Date accepted: 16 July 2024

Published online: 13 February 2025

Table of contents

Writing an email in a second language (L2 onwards) entails greater complexity than writing in the mother tongue (L1 onwards), and disagreeing with people who have a higher hierarchical or social status than the sender adds an extra level of complexity. These two characteristics require knowledge of a series of extralinguistic factors, which are essential in the codification and decoding of both pragmalinguistic (e.g. the form of address used) and sociopragmatic factors (e.g. the degree of imposition or formality) (Thomas 1983). Addressing face-threatening acts (FTAs onwards) (Levinson 1983; Pomerantz 1984), such as the speech act of disagreement, tests the interlocutor’s pragmatic competences; especially the ability to identify “relevant linguistic indexes (linguistic awareness), retrieve relevant pragmatic effects (pragmatic awareness) and explicate the link between lexical indexes and pragmatic effects retrieved (metapragmatic awareness)” (Ifantidou 2014, 130). Consequently, the lack of understanding of “what is meant by what is said” (Thomas 1983, 91) leads to what is known as “pragmatic failure”. In this context, we understand it as the lack of awareness concerning how to appropriately address the interlocutor and the context as well as the lack of consideration of contextual factors, such as power or social distance. Little research has been done regarding the way Chinese university students perform the FTA of disagreement with their lecturer in a L2 (Wu 2006). In addition, even less research has been conducted to explore how this is achieved when Chinese university students use Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) in their emails. This research analyses a corpus of Chinese university students’ emails to understand what macro- and microstructure patterns these senior Chinese students choose when writing an email to their lecturer in Spanish, its adequacy to the context and the strategies they use and prefer when dissenting. Since this study involved the construction of a textual corpus with public access, we hope to provide a double contribution to the study of communication in the academic field.

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