Chapter 10. Student-teacher e-mail interaction as asynchronous dialogue in an academic setting

This study analyses a corpus of e-mails exchanged between university students and their teachers, aiming to understand some similarities and differences between computer mediated communication (CMC) and face-to-face dialogue. Methodologically, we combine corpus analysis with systemic functional linguistics to identify patterns of experiential meaning as expressed through verbs, or Processes ( Halliday and Matthiessen 2004 ), looking at how students and teachers co-construct meaning and build rapport via e-mail. The results illustrate both similarities (informality, negotiation, near-synchronicity) and differences (personal disclosure, paralinguistic features) between e-mails and face-to-face dialogue. This seems to indicate that the two should be used in complementary ways to maximize the pragmatic effectiveness of student-teacher interaction, also harnessing the potential of other, more recent CMC technologies, like social networks.