Dissenting emails in academia

Abstract This research studies a group of Chinese university students of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) and observes the macro- and microstructure of their emails and their pragmatic competence. In order to study the features and context adequacy of their communication, a corpus of 135 emails written by fourth-year students was analysed to identify the uses and preferences concerning subject lines and opening and closing moves, and to investigate the uses and functions of strategies related to disagreement in their communication to a faculty member. Our results have reflected the obstacles that the vast majority of students manifest in the use of Spanish when it comes to adequately achieving their communicative purpose in a given context. Data also proved that the emails analysed were inappropriate due to insufficient mitigation, lack of acknowledgement of the imposition involved and lack of status-congruent language.