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Part of
Email Pragmatics and Second Language Learners
Edited by Maria Economidou-Kogetsidis, Milica Savić and Nicola Halenko
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 328] 2021
► pp. 15–40

Chapter 1
Reformulation on Chinese EFL learners’ email literacy

A preliminary exploration

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This study explored the effect of reformulation on Chinese EFL learners’ email pragmatic performance. Two high-intermediate learners of English collaboratively wrote an email (pretest), compared their original email to a reformulated version of it and to a native speaker model in the noticing stage, and revised the pretest email individually (posttest). The results indicated that (a) most of the problems found in pragmatic-related episodes in the pretest were appropriately resolved based on peer discussion; (b) the participants predominantly noticed pragmalinguistic features in the noticing stage; and (c) in the posttest, the number of changes matching the reformulation was higher than the number of those matching the native speaker model. This study closes by providing pedagogical implications for language teachers.

Keywords: reformulation, pragmatic-related episodes, Chinese learners
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Instrument
    • 2.3Procedures
    • 2.4Data analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Research question 1
    • 3.2Research question 2
    • 3.3Research question 3
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Pedagogical implications and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 27 October 2021
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https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.328.01che
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Sun, Yuqing
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