What works in academic email: A genre analysis with teacher and student perspectives

Writing email requests to teachers is a necessary part of academic life for most students at Western universities, however it is a difficult undertaking as such email is an occluded genre (Swales, 1990). Students are therefore often unfamiliar with the expectations of academic email, particularly new entrants to university and NNSs. This study undertakes a genre analysis of a corpus of student request email sent to teachers in one department at the University of Essex to determine the moves of the genre and create a pedagogically useful move structure. Fourteen moves were identified that represented the entire corpus; frequency data was then used to modify this into a nine move structure. Further data on appropriate move use was derived by scoring each corpus sample according to how well it fit with institutional norms and integrating the move use of these high-scoring samples into the move structure. Interviews were conducted with teachers and students to get a fuller understanding of move use perception in academic request email and to ensure the move structure served the needs of both parties.