An Analysis of Iranian EFL Learners’ English Written Requestive E-mails

Electronic mail is one of the widely used medium for institutional communication particularly in academic institutions. The main focus of this study was determining requesting strategies and mitigating elements used by the Iranians’ EFL learners in English written requestive emails to their professors. This study also determined opening and closing strategies and supportive moves. To this aim, 61 email were collected using DCT and analyzed by means of CCSARP (CrossCultural Speech Act Realization Pattern) coding scheme. The results showed that Iranian students, under the effect of L1 norms, used more direct strategies and to soften the force of requests they tended to use mitigating elements and prerequest supportive moves. It had been concluded that Iranian EFL students have lack of pragmatic knowledge therefore, it is necessary to make them aware of norms of requestive emails written by English native speakers.