La comunicazione tra studenti e docenti via forum e e-mail: strategie di cortesia

This study discusses the role of politeness in computer mediated communication between students and teachers in an English Linguistics course held in 2012-2014 within a BA in Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Bologna. E-mails and forum posts on an e-learning platform are assembled in an electronic corpus and compared, in order to identify recurrent patterns of linguistic behaviour, with respect to speech acts, modality, grammatical metaphors, and especially politeness. As students belong to 16 different nationalities, patterns of intercultural variation are also considered. The data show that students deployed politeness strategies competently and were aware of the specificity of these two electronic media: this emerges from their use of modal verbs, external modification, interpersonal grammatical metaphors, terms of address and degree of directness.