Creating a trusting student-professor relationship: Engagement markers in academic e-mail communication

E-mails present an interpersonal computer-mediated communication and a most-widely used form of digital communication. In the formal academic setting, digital interaction between students and professors, although used on daily bases, frequently requires students to deliver higher pragmatic competence and language awareness to reflect power asymmetry. However, it also provides an opportunity for lowering the power distance settings, and for the utilization of engagement markers in order to establish and maintain a more accommodating and beneficent environment. As the markers involving the reader into the context, engagement markers explicitly build the relationship between the students and their professors. Using both qualitative and quantitative analysis, the paper will demonstrate how the use of engagement markers as a distinct metadiscourse category in student-professor e-mail communication facilitates interaction and establishes a more trusting relationship. Using the corpus of student e-mails to professors, in both Serbian and English, the analysis will focus on the lexical elements (second person pronouns, imperatives, question forms, etc.) that explicitly address professor as the participant in the e-mail content, thus creating a more amiable context and a low power distance setting. The results will demonstrate the differences in the use of engagement markers in English with the distinct formal communication and in Serbian with less lexical formal engagement markers. Finally, the results will reveal the distinctive use of metadiscourse markers in digital environment and the informal tendencies that are gradually prevailing over the formal communication.