The Impact of Culture and Cultural Dimensions on Studentsʼ E-Mail Correspondence – A Pilot Study

Abstract

E-mail correspondence between teachers and students is common. Online communication provides students with possibilities to write to teachers directly, using a diverse level of knowledge, level of ignorance and personal beliefs. The aim of this paper is to answer whether culture and cultural dimensions (defined by Hofstede’s high and low Power Distance dimension) influence the professional correspondence between teachers and students. The small-scale corpus consists of 100 e-mails, 50 written by Slovene students in English or Slovene, and 50 by Serbian students in Serbian or English. The research investigates the choice of e-mail template, the choice of language (native tongue or language of instructions), and the norms related to politeness and power distance, with the focus on salutations, formality, polite expressions, and directness. Usage of lexical modifiers, such as downtoners, upstaters and hedges will also be investigated. The results will demonstrate that e-mails by Slovene students follow new cultural standards and have become more indirect and informal, while Serbian students write e-mails with formal salutations and direct requests following the inherited hierarchy and still unmodified cultural dimensions.