Building Intercultural Relationships through Emails

Email communication is ubiquitous in today’s globalized world, and managing intercultural relationships through email is increasingly imperative. A growing number of universities have published guidelines for students and staff on email etiquette (e.g. Cambridge University 2021; Yale University 2021). This signals that determining how to best construct messages that can achieve communication goals while appropriately reflecting the social status of the participants can be challenging for L1 and L2 speakers alike. While there is little research on L1 speakers, research in the field of L2 pragmatics has highlighted that L2 speakers – even highly proficient ones – may have difficulty constructing status-unequal emails, partly due to a lack of broadly accepted conventions for this hybrid form of oral and written communication and partly due to pragmatic and cultural differences (Economidou-Kogetsidis 2011, 2018; Wang and Halenko 2022b). While a considerable number of studies have investigated L2 email discourse, intercultural rapport management and evaluation through email have rarely been examined.

This chapter addresses this gap in the research by examining Chinese L2 users’ rapport-building strategies and British L1 and Chinese L2 English users’ evaluations of these strategies. Specifically, it reports on a study that explored (1) how Chinese L2 English users build relationships in email communication compared to L1 users, (2) how L1 and L2 speakers evaluate these relationship-building strategies and (3) the rationale behind these perceptions. The study compared Chinese L2 users’ request emails to faculty with those of British students collected over a year. Additionally, individual and focus group interviews were conducted to reflect on the email data, and the British L1 and Chinese L2 users’ evaluations of the L2 users’ relational strategies were analysed.