E-politeness in student requests to faculty: А view from a regional Russian university in the midst of a pandemic

Abstract

This paper explores pragmalinguistic strategies in the Russian language student requests made to faculty via email and Moodle learning management system (LMS) at Chelyabinsk State University, Russia, from March 2020 to March 2021, in the period of the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. Drawing from the sample and a questionnaire, we focus on the type of request and its level of imposition, as well as the internal and external modification, following a modified Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Patterns framework. The reported case study shows that students use LMS for making requests for action, and resort to email to request information. External modification is a dominant strategy used to mitigate the impositive force of the requests in the sample. LMS requests tend to be concise and directed at ‘getting stuff done’ with minimal mitigation strategies. This may illustrate a lack of essential pragmatic competence on the students’ part and be connected to the normalisation of a telegraph-style communication.