Probing EFL Students’ and Teachers’ Perceptions of Contrastive Rhetoric in the cross-cultural communication of E-mail writing (requestives) The case of Teachers and Master II students of English at M’sila University
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Date
2021-06
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Abstract
Despite the potential use of e-mails, especially requestives, students of English as a Foreign Language fail to frame appropriate e-mails. This may stem in a lack of Contrastive Rhetoric awareness and instruction. Accordingly, this study investigates students’ and teachers’ perception of CR in writing requestives. This study rational is to raise awareness in the end of improving students’ e-mail writings to meet the rhetorical conventions of requestives in particular. To bring about these objectives, this study targets 40 Master students and 07 teachers of English as a sample, and adopts a mixed method approach to data accumulation and analysis; it uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to generate findings. It also adopts an exploratory mixed method design as a convenient blueprint to carry out this investigation. Three research instruments, an online questionnaire, a structured interview, and a text corpus analysis, were designed and utilized to probe the participants’ perceptions as well as to have insights into students’ e-mails. The findings demonstrated that EFL students held low awareness levels of CR; they also showed misperceptions to conceive appropriate requestives in conformity with the netiquettes, conventions, and politeness strategies of writing e-mails. In addition, teachers at the Department of English of M’sila University did not offer a comprehensive account to instruct their students in CR, and to understand the rhetoric of L2 writing e-mails. Consequently, some pedagogical recommendations for writing effective e-mails have been suggested.
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Key words: Contrastive Rhetoric, Cross-cultural communication, E-mail, Perceptions, Requestives .