Politeness in emails sent by EFL learners

This paper addresses email requests sent by EFL learners to faculty of Azad universities of Iran during the period of the study. Speech act analysis was applied to distinguish levels of directness, and to compare lexical politeness, and the particular linguistic devices used by students. The results reveal that EFL learners manifest e-politeness in their messages to their instructors. The technology of e-mailing gives the chance to writers to modify texts before sending them, and to edit grammatical points besides pragmatic clarity and politeness. Changing degrees of politeness was accompanied by learners’ influence on instructors cooperation with them. It was observed that EFL learners use both direct and indirect techniques and elaborate syntactic modification. It may be concluded that students generally apply a wide range of both negative and positive politeness techniques in making their requests.