Salience in EFL speakers’ perceptions of formality: (In)formal greetings and address forms combined with (in)formal nouns, verbs, and adjectives

This study explores whether English-dominant (ED) speakers and speakers of English as a foreign language (EFL) perceive the same degrees of formality in combinations of (in)formal greetings (Hi/Dear) and address forms (informal First Name/Ms. Last Name) with (in)formal nouns, verbs, and adjectives (Latinate/Germanic). It also explores which of these variants the two groups perceive as salient in communicating formality. Twenty-five ED undergraduates in Canada and 27 EFL undergraduates in Slovakia rated the formality of 20 sentence-length examples of business email correspondence and identified features that were the primary basis for their formality rating. Distributions of 11 of the formality ratings were statistically significantly different in the two groups (with most effect sizes ranging from small to medium), and trends in the reports of salient features suggested that the EFL speakers focused on the formality of address forms more frequently than did the ED speakers. The findings are discussed in relation to infelicitous interlingual transfer and strategies for developing pragmatic competence.

Acquaintance with Digital Etiquette: Email Correspondence for Distance Learning

The article is devoted to the analysis of the rules of behaviour of communicants in the process of distance learning. The purpose of the study is to consider the main difficulties that arise when students and teachers communicate in the virtual space, to identify their causes and ways to overcome them. The author focuses on the rules of email etiquette. The data obtained during a survey of students and teachers of the Perm State National Research University is used by the author. The relevance of the topic raised in this article is due to the fact that at present it is an urgent need to teach students and schoolchildren the basics of digital etiquette, namely, polite communication in social networks, compliance with the etiquette of official email correspondence, etc. The methods used for research include analysis, description, observation, comparison. The results of the study showed that in the moving to distance learning, when students ' communication with the teacher becomes mediated, many students experience certain difficulties, because they do not know the rules of behaviour in cyberspace. In this regard, it is concluded that teachers should include the module " Acquaintance with digital etiquette " in the course of training in order to make communication with students more effective and develop the necessary communicative competence.

Conscientization Calls: A White Dual Language Educator’s Development of Sociopolitical Consciousness and Commitment to Social Justice

Literature is limited demonstrating how some in-service teachers have developed sociopolitical consciousness and why they commit to social justice. Drawing on interviews, email correspondence, and Facebook postings collected throughout a school year, this article shows the life experiences of one white dual language educator who developed sociopolitical consciousness and a commitment to social justice as a result of what I refer to as conscientization calls based on personal experiences and observed inequities affecting minoritized populations in U.S. and Latin American contexts. This article makes a call to promote educational equity by helping privileged pre-service and in-service teachers by using, as pedagogical tools, conscientization calls they might have received throughout their lives.

Blazing a New Trail: The Role of Communication Technology in Women’s Mountain Biking

Women’s experiences in largely male sporting worlds often include marginalization and patronizing attitudes that can make participants unwelcome. Yet some women describe positive, liberating experiences in these sports. How do these women negotiate a largely male sport? What strategies do they employ to craft supportive communities? Based on interviews with 60 mountain bikers and email correspondence with an additional 98 bikers, along with results from a global survey of over 2,300 bikers, this paper examines women’s strategies for creating communities in which they can fully participate. The research uncovers the important role of communication technologies. While media practices can promote the celebration of risk-taking and aggression, they also provide a platform for talking back and building an alternative, supportive community.

The Importance of Tone and Attitude in Email and the Online Classroom

In the online classroom, email has emerged as a predominant communication method between students and faculty. Despite many benefits of email, including ease of use, familiarity of the technology, and rapid response times, there are numerous challenges faculty face when sending and receiving email correspondence with students. Mainly, due to the medium and format of email, with its lack of cues such as body language, inflection, and other sensory stimuli, it presents a paramount challenge to faculty. However, appropriate tone and attitude in emails can help mitigate the challenges the medium presents. When written and read effectively and purposefully, email is an effective outreach and communication tool for students and faculty.

Online Aristotelian Character Friendship as an Augmented Form of Penpalship

This paper adds ammunition to recent arguments for the possibility of online character friendships in the Aristotelian sense. It does so by exploring sustained and deep email correspondence or epalship as a potential venue for the creation, development and maintenance of character friendships, and by drawing an analogy with a historically famous example of penpalship: that forged between Voltaire and Catherine the Great. It is argued that epalships allow for various technological extensions in the cyberworld of today that were not available to Voltaire and Catherine; and that augmented with those extensions, there is even more reason for seeing epalships as potentially making the grade as true character friendships than traditional penpalships. However, despite being potentially categorisable as character friendships, mature epalships are vulnerable to the same problems and pitfalls as other examples of character friendships, and perhaps even more so: pitfalls that were mostly overlooked by Aristotle himself.

Extreme Accommodation of a Child with OCD and Coercive Behaviors

This chapter illustrates the work of reducing family accommodation of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in a case of extreme family accommodation with a high level of resistance and coercive behaviors in the child. The chapter presents the case of Cora, a 12-year-old girl with OCD. The chapter introduces the case and the rationale for working only with Cora’s mother. Next the chapter reviews the course of treatment. The chapter exemplifies the challenges of working with the single parent of a highly aggressive adolescent who forcibly demands extreme levels of family accommodation and reacts with aggression to changes in the parental behavior. Transcripts from sessions and email correspondence with the therapist illustrate both the level of difficulty faced in this case as well as the power of a supportive and knowledgeable therapist to guide the parent in overcoming these challenges. The case demonstrates the ability of parent-based treatment to achieve change in an otherwise highly intractable case.

Igor Kon: «You Can’t Hide Anything From History». From Email Correspondence With I.S. Kon. Part II. 2007-2008

This article provides the second part of my six-year correspondence with I. S. Kon. It began in April 2005 and broke off on March 5, 2011, shortly before Kon's death. The first publication contained 39 letters for 2005-2006, in the period under review, 2007-2008, we exchanged 107 letters. First of all, Kon's letters provide an opportunity to get actory of Russian sociology. In addition, they show his attitude to the facts and the nature of his assessments of his colleagues' activities as well as his ethics of historical search. I emphasize that this is not about the general theoretical arguments of Kon, but about examples of his discussion of specific, very difficult scientific and ethical situations.

Igor Kon: «You Can’t Hide Anything From History» From Email Correspondence With I.S. Kon. Part I. 2005-2006

This article is an introduction to the description and analysis of the electronic correspondence of the author with I.S. Kon, held in 2005-2011. Kon belongs to a narrow group of sociologists who stood at the origins of Soviet sociology. For many years, Kon has successfully worked in different areas of sociology, at the same time he is a recognized expert in the history of Russian and Western sociology. All this: 1) makes Kon a unique expert in the field of studying the entire period of development of Russian sociology, and 2) determines the historical, sociological and methodological value of his letters. Let us pay attention to the fact that the study of the correspondence of sociologists is a poorly studied topic, but there is a tendency to increase attention to it. The total number of letters is about 200. The texts of 39 letters for 2005-2006 are given. The history of correspondence and its content is briefly considered.

Professional Identity Representation in a Successful Intercultural Communication: A Socio-Cognitive Perspective

The aims of this research were to analyze the representation of professional identity through the language use in email correspondence, the way it was achieved, and its implication toward a successful intercultural communication. The model of analyzing the language usage in this research was based on Van Djik’s socio-cognitive perspective (2018) and the work of Patel, et. al (2011) in which they argue that the language usage is a results of mental processing. The mental processes in this research was specified into conclusion withdrawal about other culture which then used for an effective intercultural communication and intended to be a successful one. This research was qualitative in nature in which it was described descriptively. The source of the data in this research was the email correspondence conducted by the employees of Adventure Lombok tour and travel. The data were collected through observation and transcript analysis. The results of this research indicated that the employees of Adventure Lombok company were indeed represented their professional identity, this professional Identity was reflected and accomplished through a variety of ways which were consideration toward their customers preferences, a prompt and accommodating reply, providing honest suggestion, and service oriented which then lead to a successful intercultural communication that can be seen from the sells that the employees made. All of these were believed to be the result of previous ‘intercultural contact’ which were stored within the cognitive of the employees and retrieved for later use. This result is in line with Li and Patel (2011:22) in which they argued that “intercultural communication is influenced by the quality of the intercultural contact that we have in our personal and professional environments”.