ABSTRACT
The international classroom is rapidly becoming the norm rather than the exception in most academic settings in North America and throughout the world. This internationalization also implies the co-presence of a variety of cultural backgrounds. At most Canadian universities, many classes have a very mixed student body, with many international students or recent immigrants to the country for whom English is not the first or even the second language (cf. Cecchetto and Stroińska 2006). In the last few years, electronically mediated forms of communication (CMCs) have replaced more traditional face-to-face exchanges between instructors and students and among the students themselves outside the classroom. This change in the medium and channel of communication naturally influences the dynamics of human interaction. Because of this shift, any principles of facework originally developed for the once natural face-to-face encounters (cf. Goffman 1967) need to be modified and adapted to the new means of communication. The fact that in CMC the addressee may not be aware of the cultural background and the native versus nonnative speaker’s status of the sender may result in the addressee possibly forming opinions and impressions about the sender without the benefit of the information available in the face-to-face encounters. In this chapter, we focus on e-mails initiated by students and comment about the effects of the language and politeness strategies used (or lacking) in order to examine why some e-mail formats may appear impolite or rude to the instructor and how this may inadvertently affect the student. Even though CMC seems to offer a level playing field for nonnative speakers of the language, we focus on situations where the difference in cultural backgrounds may play a role in the perceptions of nonnative speakers and in negative stereotyping.
