Requests in Student-to-Professor Emails of Korean EFL Students

The present study investigates how Korean university students formulate their requests in English emails toward their non-Korean professors. The data is comprised of 150 requestive emails sent to six foreign professors teaching freshmen English courses at a Korean university. First, the email data was classified into five different request types: requests for test results, requests for class-related information, requests for feedback, requests for grade change/revision, and requests for meeting. Then, the data is analyzed with a focus on request strategies and internal modifiers that the students employed in forming their requests. The findings reveal that the students largely resorted to direct strategies and inadequately mitigated their requests lexically and syntactically. In addition, the students' use of strategies and mitigating devices did not significantly differ across the request types. The findings suggest that the students generally lacked linguistic flexibility and politeness strategies to write status-congruent requestive emails. Pedagogical implications are discussed regarding the findings.