Students' pragmatic proficiency in written interaction: Spontaneous and elicited email requests to faculty in L1 Italian and L2 English

This paper examines corpora of spontaneous and elicited student email requests to faculty in L1 Italian (120 texts; about 9,000 words) and L2 English (120 texts, about 9,700 words). Four dimensions were considered: structure and interaction management, content, requestive strategies, and form, each comprising a set of features. Most features were rated with binary values (positive vs negative) except for accuracy, which was rated on a 3-point scale (positive vs fair vs negative). Three findings emerged: the Italian sub-corpora were given slightly higher values than the English ones for communicative effectiveness, but not for email structure; also, spontaneously produced Italian and English texts and Italian elicited texts were rated better than English elicited texts; however, all the sub-corpora revealed problems in paragraphing and illocution-specific strategies. In general, all the sub-corpora were less than ideal in their structure, strategies and form.