Professional e-mail communication in higher education in Hong Kong: a case study

Abstract

E-mail has firmly established itself as a dominant channel of interaction for both social and professional purposes. Despite its importance as a communication tool, the influence of professional roles on discursive practices has yet to be thoroughly addressed, especially when e-mail is specifically used between academics, students, and other relevant stakeholders in the higher education setting, where English is a second or foreign language.

Through the case study of an e-mail corpus containing messages received by an academic in one year, this paper investigates the general discursive patterns, discourse structures, and nonstandard linguistic features of e-mail discourse in higher education in Hong Kong. Specifically, it examines how such discursive practices are influenced by sender roles and sender–receiver relationships. Findings from the present study show traces of interdiscursivity in e-mail use in the academic domain and how sender roles influence the level of interdiscursivity between e-mail and genres of old and new. The similarities and differences in the discursive practices between academic professionals and students in e-mail communication also underscore the importance of having more fine-grained accounts of e-mail use in a wide range of settings in professional communication.