Greetings in Letters by EFL Primary School Children. A Longitudinal Study
Abstract
In this study we look at the use of salutations and valedictions in letters by primary school learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Second language discourse studies have paid relatively little attention to the structural and pragmatic aspects of letter writing by university EFL learners. However, obligatory greetings in letters have been superficially addressed in research, hidden among other aspects. Likewise, there is a dearth of longitudinal studies to help understand how, over time, EFL learners (and in our case primary school students) develop discourse and pragmatic competence in letter writing, particularly with regard to its most distinguishable features: salutations and valedictions. In the present study we traced individual learners’ performance over three school years in order to identify patterns of use and developmental tendencies. The findings suggest the existence of stages of development in the use of greetings. In the process of acquisition, salutations come first and in many cases they are overextended to fulfil the functions of complimentary closings. Finally, the analysis of greetings uncovers children’s personal/individual voices and identities and reveals how children perceive their addressees.
Keywords: greetings; letters; discourse development; pragmatic development; primary school EFL learners
Downloads
References
Al-Khatib, Mahmoud A. 2001. “The Pragmatics of Letter writing.” World Englishes 20 (2): 179-200.
Arvani, Mansour. 2006. “A Discourse Analysis of Business Letters Written by Iranians & Native Speakers.” The Asian ESP Journal 1 (2): 12-23.
Askehave, Inger and John M. Swales. 2001. “Genre Identification and Communicative Purpose: A Problem and a Possible Solution.” Applied Linguistics 22 (2): 195-212.
Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen and Heidi E. Vellenga. 2012. “The Effect of Instruction on Conventional Expressions in L2 Pragmatics.” System 40 (1): 77-89.
Barón, Julia. 2015. “‘Can I Make a Party, Mum?’ The Development of Requests from Childhood to Adolescence.” Atlantis 37 (1): 179-198.
Barton, David and Nigel Hall, eds. 1999. Letter Writing as a Social Practice. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Berko-Gleason, Jean. 1993. The Development of Language. New York: Macmillan.
Bhatia, Vijay Kumar. 2004. Worlds of Written Discourse: Genre-Based View. London: Continuum.
Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Bruce, Emily. 2014. “‘Each word shows how you love me’: The social literacy practice of children’s letter writing (1780-1860).” Paedagogica Historica 50 (3): 247-264.
Caron, Andre and Scott Ward. 1975. “Gift Decisions by Kids and Parents.” Journal of Advertising Research 15 (4): 15-20.
Cekaite, Asta. 2007. “A Child’s Development of Interactional Competence in a Swedish L2 Classroom.” The Modern Language Journal 91: 45-62.
Clark, Eve V. 1995. The Lexicon in Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Collins, Laura. 2004. “The Particulars on Universals: A Comparison of the Acquisition of Tense-Aspect Morphology among Japanese- and French-Speaking Learners of English.” Canadian Modern Language Review/La Revue Canadienne des Langues Vivantes 61 (2): 251-274.
Corder, Stephen P. 1967. “The Significance of Learners’ Errors.” International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 5 (1-4): 161-170.
Cory, Hugh. 1999. Advanced Writing with English in Use. CAE. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Crowhurst, Marion. 1990. Sixth-Graders Learn from Letter Writing. Research Report ED 315 776. Vancouver: The University of British Columbia.
Cullen, Kay and Elaine O’Donoghue, eds. 2005. Chambers Desktop Guides. Letter Writing. Edinburgh: Chambers.
Downs, A. Chris. 1983. “Letters to Santa Claus: Elementary School-Age Children’s Sex Typed Toy Preferences in A Natural Setting.” Sex Roles 9 (2): 159-163.
Duranti, Alessandro. 2009. “Universal and Cultural-Specific Properties of Greetings.” In Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader, edited by Alessandro Duranti, 188-213. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.
Ellis, Rod, 1994. The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Félix-Brasdefer, J. César. 2008. “Pedagogical Intervention and the Development of Pragmatic Competence in Learning Spanish as a Foreign Language.” Issues in Applied Linguistics 16 (1): 49-84.
Field, John, 2004. Psycholinguistics: The Key Concepts. London and New York: Routledge.
Ghobadi, Arezoo and Mansoor Fahim. 2009. “The Effect of Explicit Teaching on English ‘Thanking Formulas’ on Iranian EFL Intermediate Level Students at English Language Institutes.” System 37 (3): 526-537.
Gumperz, John J. (1968) 2009. “The Speech Community.” In Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader, edited by Alessandro Duranti, 43-52. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.
Harklau, Linda. 2011. “Commentary: Adolescent L2 Writing Research as Emerging Field.” Journal of Second Language Writing 20 (3): 227-230.
Holmes, Janet. 1994. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. London and New York: Longman.
Hyon, Sunny. 2011. “Evaluation in Tenure and Promotion Letters: Constructing Faculty as Communicators, Stars, and Workers.” Applied Linguistics 32 (4): 389-407.
Kuiper, Koenraad. 2004. “Formulaic Performance in Conventionalised Varieties of Speech.” In Formulaic Sequences: Acquisition, Processing and Use, edited by Norbert Schmitt, 37-54. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamims.
Laver, John. 1981. “Linguistic Routines and Politeness in Greeting and Parting.” In Conversational Routine, edited by Florian Coulmas, 289-304. The Hague: Mouton.
Li, Jie and Norbert Schmitt. 2009. “The Acquisition of Lexical Phrases in Academic Writing: A Longitudinal Case Study.” Journal of Second Language Writing 18: 85-102.
Lindgren, Eva and Marie Stevenson. 2013. “Interactional Resources in Letters of Young Writers in Swedish and English.” Journal of Second Language Writing 22: 390-405.
Maier, Paula. 1992. “Politeness Strategies in Business Letters by Native and Non-Native English Speakers.” English for Specific Purposes 11 (3): 189-205.
Pinter, Annamaria. 2011. Children Learning Second Languages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Richardson, John G. and Carl H. Simpson. 1982. “Children, Gender, and Social Structure: An Analysis of the Contents of Letters to Santa Claus.” Child Development 53 (2): 429-436.
Shively, Rachel L. 2011. “L2 Pragmatic Development in Study Abroad: A Longitudinal Study of Spanish Service Encounters.” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (6): 1818-1835.
Sims, Brenda R. and Stephen Guice. 1992. “Differences between Business Letters from Native and Non-Native Speakers of English.” Journal of Business Communication 29: 23-39.
Smith, Margaret W. 2005. “Students as Contrastive Rhetoricians: Examining ESL Student Perceptions of L1 and L2 Rhetorical Conventions.” Arizona Working Papers in SLAT 12: 80-98.
Spencer-Oatey, Helen, ed. 2000. Culturally Speaking. Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures. London: Continuum.
Viberg, Ake. 2002. “Basic Verbs in Second Language Acquisition.” Revue Française de Linguistique Appliquée 8 (2): 61-79.
Zohar, Anat and Bracha Peled. 2008. “The Effects of Explicit Teaching of Metastrategic Knowledge on Low- and High-Achieving Students.” Learning and Instruction 18: 337-353.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The authors retain copyright of articles. They authorise AEDEAN to publish them in its journal Atlantis and to include them in the indexing and abstracting services, academic databases and repositories the journal participates in.
Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), for non-commercial (i.e., personal or academic) purposes only, users are free to share (i.e., copy and redistribute in any medium or format) and adapt (i.e., remix, transform and build upon) articles published in Atlantis, free of charge and without obtaining prior permission from the publisher or the author(s), as long as they give appropriate credit to the author, the journal (Atlantis) and the publisher (AEDEAN), provide the relevant URL link to the original publication and indicate if changes were made. Such attribution may be done in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the journal endorses the user or their use of the material published therein. Users who adapt (i.e., remix, transform or build upon the material) must distribute their contributions under the same licence as the original.
Self-archiving is also permitted, so that authors are allowed to deposit the published PDF version of their articles in academic and/or institutional repositories, without fee or embargo. Authors may also post their individual articles on their personal websites, again on condition that the original link to the online edition is provided.
Authors are expected to know and heed basic ground rules that preclude simultaneous submission and/or duplicate publication. Prospective contributors to Atlantis commit themselves to the following when they submit a manuscript:
- That no concurrent consideration of the same, or almost identical, work by any other journal and/or publisher is taking place.
- That the potential contribution has not appeared previously, in any form whatsoever, in another journal, electronic format or as a chapter/section of a book.
Seeking permission for the use of copyright material is the responsibility of the author.
