Investigating the Speech Act of Request in Computer-Mediated Communication: A Study of Iranian University Students

With the advancement of technology, students’ means of communication have changed from regular face-to-face appointments to email communications with professors and faculty members. Students send emails to faculty members for several reasons such as requests for appointments, advice, or course-related information. This study investigates email request strategies used by Iranian university students when communicating with their faculty members. To this end, a corpus of 200 emails (13103 words) was compiled within 4 years from Payame Noor University students majoring in humanities. The data were then coded for request strategies along with both internal and external modification devices. The findings showed that direct strategies were the most frequently used, with imperative and like/appreciate statements being the most frequently used direct strategy. Moreover, downtoners and attention getters ranked first and second among internal modification devices, while grounders and appreciation ranked first and second among external modifiers. These findings are expected to provide insights into Persian pragmatics and have implications for teaching Persian to language learners.