Emails

Despite the increasing interest scholarly research has shown in the study of computer-mediated communication, there is still a need to investigate the empirical validity of assumed homogeneity of language usage over the net and focus on the social diversity and variation that characterizes any communication. With this in mind, the present paper is an investigation into the stylistic choices that a particular group of email users made when engaged in a specific activity type. More specifically, it explores the variation in the discourse practices employed to open and close emails in conversation alongside the institutional power of participants and the interactional position of each email contributing to the conversation.

To carry out this study a corpus of short email conversations in Peninsular Spanish was collected (n = 240). The analysis focused on the opening and closing sequences of the emails that made up the conversations and considered opening and closing linguistic conventions as discursive practices that members of a community may use strategically. The findings revealed that the discursive practices under scrutiny were subject not only to technological but also to social and interactional constraints and thus highlighted contextual variability. Further, the high degree of sociability in the electronic episodes studied was interpreted as reflecting a “people first, business second” communicative style.

The main aim of this paper is to present briefly how “fear” contributes to the construction of deception through the abovementioned narratives. We will take into account not only the linguistic and psychological elements used to cause real fears in their recipients, but also the fake and real fears their senders may have, adding examples to our findings. We will pay
specific attention to the influence of gender stereotypes in certain narratives where the senders’ gender/ed identity was faked, and to the connection between spam e-mails and
fairytales. The aim of this paper is to find out the relation between spam e-mails, fairytales and gender stereotypes regarding fear. Our analysis suggests a parallelism between the reproduction of gender stereotypes in the new communication tools and the same stereotypes found in traditional fairytales. We will focus on how fear connects spam and fairytales, and how this parallelism and the gender stereotypes found in both kinds of texts can take part in the linguistic mechanisms used by spammers to make their stories believable.

This study investigates enhancing the English Reading and Writing Skills of Palestinian English Majors by Using CALL. The study was conducted at the English Department in Hebron University in the second semester of the academic year 2008 2009. The focus of the study is the Integrated Language Skills course. The population comprised 104 students. The students took the reading and writing portions of a standardized English language test, and a questionnaire was used to assess the achievement of the control group and the experimental group. The two researchers investigated whether there was a significant difference between the two groups in four dimensions, namely, computter anxiety, computer importance, attitudes, and productivity. The results indicate that CALL enhanced the Reading and Writing skills as evidenced by the statistically significcant differences in the post-test between the control group and the experimental group. Also, using CALL has been shown to include the added advantages of promoting mottivation, increasing self-confidence, encouraging learner-centeredness and decreasing the anxiety felt by the students. Moreover, CALL makes EFL enjoyable, meaningful, motivating relevant, and exciting. Finally, the results of this study revealed that using
CALL enhances the reading and writing skills and proficiency of English majors. The two researchers conclude by offering some practical recommendations on using CALL to enhance English language skills of English majors at Hebron University.

This study investigates enhancing the English Reading and Writing Skills of Palestinian English Majors by Using CALL. The study was conducted at the English Department in Hebron University in the second semester of the academic year 2008-2009. The focus of the study is the Integrated Language Skills course. The population comprised 104 students. The students took the reading and writing portions of a standardized English language test, and a questionnaire was used to assess the achievement of the control group and the experimental group. The two researchers investigated whether there was a significant difference between the two groups in four dimensions, namely, comput ter anxiety, computer importance, attitudes, and productivity. The results indicate that CALL enhanced the Reading and Writing skills as evidenced by the statistically signifitcant differences in the post-test between the control group and the experimental group. Also, using CALL has been shown to include the added ad...

e-mail + e-meetings + e-expeditions + e-learning = e-education
The term "e-education" refers to the application of Internet
technology to the delivery of learning experiences. E-education takes place in formal electronic classrooms, on corporate intranets used for just-in-time training, audio and video teleconferencing and in a variety of other technology-mediated learning spaces. The primary tools of e-education are e-mail, e-meetings, e-expeditions, and the methodologies of a pedagogy known as e-learning.

This paper explicitly addresses the ‘elicited versus natural data debate’ in cross-cultural speech act realisation research through critical discussion of an empirical study of comparable request sequences by Spanish and British undergraduates to one of their lecturers. Elicited (discourse completion tests) and natural data (unsolicited emails) were used and, not unexpectedly, produced significantly different results for each language community. That these differences related to crucial aspects of the interpretation and performance of requesting behaviour — such as organisation, density and politeness choices — leads us to argue that the goals of cross-cultural speech act realisation research can be best pursued through the analysis of natural data. The latter, however, should not be regarded as some methodological panacea but needs to be exposed to the same intellectual rigour that elicited data have been.