Communication Strategies and Topics in E-mail Interactions between Iranian EFL Students and Their Instructors

This paper investigated the communicative strategies and topics addressed by Iranian EFL non-native English speaking students (NNESSs) at both undergraduate and graduate levels in their natural, authentic e-mail interactions with their instructors at two universities in Isfahan, Iran during 2006 to 2009. Following the literature, the communicative strategies were analyzed as a) requesting, b) reporting, and c) negotiating. The communicative topics were also categorized as a) facilitative, b) substantive, and c) relational. The subcategories of each group were also analyzed in terms of descriptive statistics, calculating frequencies/percentages, and inferential statistics by employing the Chi-square. The findings of the study revealed that there were significant differences among the percentage of the communicative strategies employed, requesting being the favored strategy. The study showed that at both levels, students send e-mails to make different kinds of requests. The results also indicated that there were significant differences among the percentage of the communicative topics and the choice of the topics were different at the two levels.