Pragmatic strategies in Saudi Arabian university students’ communication with lecturers: a comparison of language and gender

Abstract

This thesis aims to provide a better understanding of intracultural communication in the Saudi Arabian higher education context by examining the pragmatic and linguistic features of Saudi male and female students’ email communication with their Saudi male lecturers. It uses a qualitative exploratory research design that examined 400 authentic emails sent by students to their lecturers during a normal semester. The study investigated the ways in which the emails were composed—and the purposes they served in this institutional context—in terms of the language they were written in (i.e., Arabic or English) and the sender’s gender.As the Saudi education system has a unique gender-segregated structure in which female students are unable to be taught face-to-face by male lecturers, it was hypothesised that the differences in access to lecturers between male and female students would be reflected in their emailing behaviours. The main areas where a difference was apparent was in the use of relational communication (i.e., small talk and compliments). There were also differences in the ways requests were justified, with female students tending to use more justifications than male students. These findings suggest that students of both genders strived to maintain a relationship with lecturers, but in different ways: for male students, email is a continuation of face-to-face communication; for female students, it is the only form of direct contact they can use to build rapport with male lecturers.The findings also showed some variation depending on the language in which the emails were composed. Certain expressions used in Arabic were absent from the English emails, such as the use of du’a. The use of longer and more detailed justifications in the Arabic data also reflects an ease of use that was not seen in the English emails. Overall, the findings indicate that certain features of email communication are culture-bound; for example, professional address terms, religious expressions, and requests using imperative or want forms were found in the students’ emails regardless of the language they were written in. This was interpreted in terms of pragmatic transfer, where pragmatic features of the students’ L1 (Arabic) were transferred to their L2 (English).Regardless of gender or language, the most common reason for sending an email was to make a request, often accompanied by justifications and relational communication. Interestingly, the students in my study focused more on the way they modified their requests, rather than the requests themselves. The modification of requests appeared to relate to the degree to which the request imposed upon the lecturer. For high imposition requests—as determined by the lecturers—students tended to use more varied modification strategies than they did for low imposition requests. This aligns with previous studies into Arabic politeness and requestive strategies, which found that Arabs tend to use a variety of modifications to minimise the potential imposition of their request and maintain rapport (Al-Marrani & Sazalie, 2010; Al-Ageel, 2016; Al-Zumor, 2011; Hariri, 2017).This thesis builds on the study of institutional communication in Saudi society and can be used to provide lecturers—both in Saudi Arabia and abroad—with a better understanding of Saudi students’ communicative styles.