E-mail Literacy in Higher Education Academic Settings

Abstract

The research purpose was to identify (1) the problems encountered by academic and administrative staff in emails received from students, (2) positive and negative qualities of the authentic emails of higher education students, (3) functional explanations of the academic email, (4) the problems encountered by students in emails received from academic and administrative staff, and (5) higher education students’ email writing awareness. An exploratory sequential mixed design was used. The study group consisted of 15 staff and 1064 higher education students. The qualitative data were collected from staff interviews and 80 authentic emails of students. And a survey was prepared based on qualitative data and then quantitative data were collected. The problems encountered by staff are style, carelessness, articulacy problem, spelling and punctuation problem, email incivility. The negative qualities of authentic emails are as follows: not using institutional username, formal language, paragraph structure in the email body, salutation, closing statement, contact information; username without name and surname, blank subject line, spelling and punctuation problems, sloppy wording, lack of self-introduction. Non-descriptive, late, and short answers, not getting answers, sloppy answers, emails with negative feelings disturbed students. Students’ awareness of writing academic emails displayed a more positive picture than the emails they wrote. Items in which students’ awareness is weak are as follows: trying to reflect their feelings to email, using punctuation marks to convey the feeling, writing email for long and complex matter, using paragraph structure, adding contact details, CC - BCC. Research results were discussed with relevant literature.

Improving undergraduate students' email etiquette with computer‐based instruction

“…Email use can increase the frequency and quality of student interactions with instructors outside the classroom (see Hoffman, 2014, for a review). However, instructors report that students often send overly informal or otherwise inappropriate emails (e.g., Konuk, 2021), which can negatively affect instructors' perceptions of students (e.g., Stephens et al, 2009). Furthermore, most entry‐level professional or managerial jobs require email writing (Braun et al, 2016) and employers consider “polished email” an important writing skill (Al‐Musalli, 2019), but undergraduates may not graduate with the written communication skills that they need to be successful in the workplace (Hart Research Associates, 2015).…”