Cross-Cultural Emailing Politeness for Taiwanese Students

Abstract

My students have been writing communicatively with international e-pals in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) since 1996. After analyzing the email messages of my students and their international e-pals, I have generalized the following seven_x000D_ email politeness rules for Taiwan-Chinese students to follow: (R1) offer counteranswers in the context for any questions that you ask, (R2) answer all questions asked by the e-pal, (R3) talk about the same topics as the e-pal, (R4) talk_x000D_ about something new to facilitate the e-pal's reply, (R5) salute properly, (R6) do not_x000D_ ask questions to which your e-pal has given the answer, and (R7) do not make up stories. The above seven rules were formed in chronological order from R1 in 1996 to R6 and R7 in 2000._x000D_ This paper discussed how the seven rules were gradually formed and how I did five experimental studies on the Taiwan-Chinese e-mail reply, trying to find out why Taiwan-Chinese poorly follow R2 and the different communicative competence_x000D_ between males and females, as well as that between junior high school and university students.