E-politeness in Iranian English Electronic Requests to the Faculty

This paper reports the findings of a study designed to investigate English e-requests of Iranian EFL postgraduate students (i.e., nonnative speakers of English) made to their professors during their education at Islamic Azad University, Najaf Abad Branch, Isfahan, Iran, to find out types of politeness features employed in the students’ e-mails and the extent to which these features might influence the degree of politeness of the students’ e-mails to the faculty. To that end, both quantitative and qualitative approaches were employed to investigate 60 English e-mails composed by the participants. The findings revealed that the Iranian students’ English e-mails were not overly adorned with politeness features. The results also indicated that such direct and unmodified e-mails failed to create e-polite messages to the faculty and, therefore, were capable of causing pragmatic failure.