Markers of politeness and impoliteness in student-teacher interaction in the discourse genre of emails

Abstract

Politeness is a socio-pragmatic phenomenon that conditions the success or failure of communication. Consequently, this study aims to investigate the markers of politeness and impoliteness in pupil-teacher interaction at the university stage in Spain using email, one of the most used discourse genres today. The objectives formulated for this study are: 1) To study the opinion of a group of university students on their preparedness for the composing of emails; 2) to compare the perception that the participating subjects have about their ability in the different aspects related with email composition with the competence that is seen in the composition of such texts in the analysed corpus; 3) to design a didactic intervention to teach how to compose emails, and to put it into practice so as to improve the results; 4) to compare the results after the didactic intervention. Descriptive and inferential statistical analysis has been carried out on an opinion questionnaire of 160 students on the composition of emails and on a corpus of 120 emails. A didactic intervention was then designed, based on the results obtained. Subsequently, another corpus of 60 emails was selected to compare the results from before and after the intervention. The results demonstrate considerable improvement in many aspects.