Language use in emails during Covid-19 pandemic in the context of higher educational relations

Abstract

Language used in emails is unique, diverse with no fixed format or fixed set of words to writing an email. Depending on situations, the purpose of communications and individuals' preference, language use would vary in different sets of email genres. Thus, this study attempted (1) to analyse the language structure use in emails between international institutions during COVID-19 pandemic crisis, and (2) to investigate the pattern of the language used in emails between the international institutions during COVID-19 pandemic crisis. This study utilized the qualitative case study design. The emails collected for the data analysis were attained from only one rich informant that exchanges emails daily with international institutions as their management tasks. 24 emails were selected for a comprehensive analysis of the language used based on two themes which are language structure and language pattern adopted from AlAfnan (2017). The results from this study showed that (1) there are 3 types of intertextuality or language structures employed by writers in the emails. Referential intertextuality was the most used language structure followed by functional intertextuality. Both of these structures were commonly found in the hybrid genre emails in this study. The Generic Intertextuality analysis reported that over half of the emails used the same generic structures which are the framing and content moves in forming their emails. Interestingly, quite several emails omit the compulsory framing moves of “signature”. Moreover, this study revealed that (2) informing genre (29.2%) is the most used genre followed by delivery email (8.3%) and enquiry email (8.3%). Taking into note, these three (informing + delivery, informing + enquiry and delivery + enquiry genres) are the hybrid genres detected. Writers employ both written and spoken language features with some non-verbal cues to help them delivered their messages while maintaining healthy partnerships. Thus, the variety of language structure and language patterns give awareness and guidelines to whoever wants to write an email and that writers are free to choose their writing style. The significance, limitations and implications of the study were also discussed in the study. Lastly, recommendations were suggested to widen the context of the study of language use in emails especially in the context of international relations and in different types of crises.