Greetings as a Politeness Strategy in EFL Distance Learning Students' Official Emails

Abstract

The current study attempts to discover English as a Foreign Language (EFL) distance learning male students’ awareness of email greetings as a politeness strategy in English computer-mediated communication (CMC). To this end, 200 email messages sent from distance learning students at King Faisal University, Saudi Arabia, to their graduation project supervisor were analyzed. The degree of formality of these messages was very high for two main reasons. First, all of the email messages comprised instances of first-time contact with the supervisor. Second, the social distance between the students and their supervisor was high. Hence, the students were expected to use formal email greetings. The emails sent by the analyzed sample were put into three categories: begun with formal greetings, started by informal greetings, and null-greeting emails. Contrary to expectations, only 16.5% used formal English email greetings. The remaining students chose religious greetings (20.5%), less formal greetings (7%), or null greetings (56%). The large number of null greeting emails suggests that the students’ awareness of greetings as a politeness strategy was low. Hence, the study concluded with implications to ensure increasing EFL students’ awareness of politeness strategies in CMC.