A linguistic study of politeness in academic request emails sent by undergraduates to their professors in Jordan

The present study explored how Jordanian EFL students employed politeness strategies in academic request emails sent to their professors. The sample of the study included 116 request emails. These emails were collected between October 2023 and December 2023. The researchers examined each email and codified them according to the level of directness, forms of address, and politeness modifiers. The findings of the study demonstrated students’ lack of the appropriate pragmatic knowledge to form their request emails. Moreover, this study found that students relied for the most part on the following three politeness modifiers: interrogatives, embedded sentences and the politeness marker “please”. The study concluded that the lack of linguistic knowledge, the limited experience in writing academic emails, the impact of Arabic culture, the effect of technology in the format of emails and the absence of feedback from professors were the major reasons for composing inappropriate request emails by Jordanian EFL students. EFL teachers may use the findings of the study to improve the linguistic knowledge of students in writing formal academic requests.