This thesis derives from the need to investigate apology as a speech act. Despite a growing interest, research in apologies still remains in its infancy regarding the email practices of Arab EFL learners. Given the scarcity of research on Egyptian L2 learners, particularly in power-asymmetrical contexts involving university students and their lecturers, this thesis addresses a significant gap in the literature by examining Egyptians’ L2 apology emails to their university teaching staff. It is often observed that when Egyptian EFL students send apology emails to their lecturers in English, their emails unintentionally fail to communicate the intended politeness and sincerity. This may be due to the choice of apology strategies, the wordiness of their email, or a mismatch in the learners’ assessment of the severity of the situation and/or other sociopragmatic factors. Therefore, this thesis is based on the hypothesis that these emails may often be perceived negatively, and the apologies might not always be acknowledged by the recipients, leading therefore to pragmatic failure. Prior research also indicated that such failure could have negative consequences on the student-professor relationship. This thesis therefore aims to examine Egyptian EFL learners’ apology email practices and to establish whether their apology emails might fail pragmatically and if so, why. It further aims to examine the effect of L1 email pragmatics (L1 influence) on the learners’ L2 email apology performance.
In order to investigate learners’ email performance and its pragmatic success/failure, a mixed-method approach was adopted, using a sequential exploratory design (SED). The initial qualitative.
study which served as the starting point of the research, investigated 300 authentic L2 English apology emails produced by Egyptian university students. It analyzed the pragmalinguistic strategies of their emails - content moves and framing moves (i.e. email openings and closings) - in order to identify the most preferred strategies and the most frequent contexts in which these learners issued apologies. The findings of this preliminary investigation informed the second study of this thesis. The subsequent study employed an electronic discourse completion task (eDCT) in order (a) to elicit email apologies from L1 Arabic and L2 English learners (university students) and (b) to examine how learners perceived the influence of sociopragmatic factors - such as social distance, social power, and severity of situation - on their choice of apology strategies. This examination allowed for capturing the possible pragmatic influence of L1 (Arabic) on the learners’ L2 email production in terms of content moves and framing devices. Subsequently, the emails produced in the eDCT informed a perception study which provided the third investigation. This was carried out through the use of a perception questionnaire which aimed to capture the email perceptions of a number of university lecturers (American and Egyptian) and Egyptian students (EFL learners) regarding some of the learners’ apology emails.
The results from the three interrelated investigations revealed three new culture-specific apology strategies employed by learners (i.e. flattery, emotional manipulation, and face restoration), which were not part of a previous taxonomy. The findings also evidenced pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic influence of L1 (Arabic) on the L2 apology emails of the EFL learners in terms of both content moves and framing moves. The results also revealed how the pragmalinguistic strategies that the learners employed and the length of their emails were strongly influenced by their perception of sociopragmatic factors (social distance, power, and severity of the offense). Finally, results confirmed that the learners’ apology emails were unfavorably perceived by the recipients (both the lecturers and the students) and they could therefore be seen as pragmatically unsuccessful in the power-asymmetrical situations examined. Informed by the results and their implications, this thesis offers pedagogical recommendations for both TESOL educators and curriculum designers, while suggesting future avenues of further research.