Pragmatic strategies and politeness in email exchanges by business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF) users in a Thai higher education setting: managing miscommunication, enhancing intercultural communication and indicating levels of formality

Abstract

Email exchange is one of the most widely chosen means of communication in this digital age in many social situations and in professional environments. It is very beneficial as it can be used as a proof of communication in the form of written interaction which is different from a face-to-face conversation. In a university, international relations affairs staff are directly responsible for dealing with internationally transactional encounters on behalf of the university frequently employing methods of online communication. Therefore, email exchanges in English are essential for their duties and responsibilities. Furthermore, appropriate pragmatic strategies are crucial in order to pre-empt and remedy communication breakdowns ensuring successful communication. More than that, the strategies are also used to achieve successful business negotiations, and even better when politeness is taken into account in such communicative interactions building good relations between the interactants. In addition, among people who use English as a lingua franca (ELF) in general and also English as a lingua franca in business encounters (BELF) particularly, various pragmatic strategies are used to understand and negotiate meaning when uncertainty of understanding occurs. Therefore, pragmatic strategies and politeness are significant factors for mutual understanding and successful interactions among intercultural interlocutors, making studies on such topics worth investigating. This research aims to understand how (B)ELF users in a Thai university setting make use of pragmatic strategies in written communication, and how politeness is constructed in their email ii exchanges in business/administrative transactions with other English language users who have different linguistic and cultural backgrounds to create successfully communicative interactions. The qualitative research approach was selected to capture their authentic practices in business transactions through BELF. Methods of interviews, focus groups and a corpus of emails were utilized to gather the data from the participants. The content analysis approach was considered as an analytical tool for data analysis uncovering the naturally occurring instances in communication where the awareness of intercultural interactions is to be found. From the results, it is evident that a variety of pragmatic strategies were employed in BELF email interactions. Although the strategies handling communicative problems discovered are quite similar to those found in spoken ELF studies, a few emergent strategies were uncovered in this asynchronized written communication. In addition, strategies enhancing intercultural communication were found to be useful since they helped to create rapport between the interactants, accommodate to each other, and build intimacy, thus they encourage better relationships and business transactions in the future. In terms of politeness in emails specifically in the aspect of formality, the opening-closing addresses used constitute different levels of formality mainly based on social factors of power and distance. The data in this study confirms that the addresses were significant indicators of levels of formality signaling the dynamic and evolving nature of the email relationships and also managing relationships in the direction of more familiarity which interactants felt would be beneficial to their negation through BELF emails. Additionally, interview and focus group data showed, the perceptions of English language used and intercultural awareness were observed in that participants’ perceptions and experiences considerably affected the ways they constructed and interpreted the intercultural messages. There is a contradiction between stated values and actual performance; though the ENL notion seems to be inherently embedded, the participants’ actual use likely follows the ELF perspective. The participants positioned themselves at different levels of intercultural awareness in various circumstances to finally lead to mutual understanding and achieve competent communication. All in all, the BELF emails on international affairs were more like spoken conversations, especially when the encouraging intercultural communication strategies were exploited; the communicators preferred to establish intimacy through a variety of strategies and to compensate for lack of intonation, tone and facial expression which could be found in face-to-face interactions. Emergent pragmatic strategies including politeness with more delicate opening-closing address categorization indicating different levels of formality, were revealed contributing to a better and iii wider understanding of authentic use of success BELF emails which will be useful in understanding BELF email use in similar contexts.

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ORCID for William Baker: orcid.org/0000-0003-0533-2795

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