Email as a digital genre for Spanish University Students in Blended Learning of the Spanish Language

Abstract

Email is one of the main digital communication tools between teachers and students in the academic field of university education; however, in many cases, the emails sent to teachers contain many mistakes and inadequacies. The aim of this paper is to identify and to describe possible communicative deficiencies in the emails of university students. To do this, a corpus of emails sent through Online Classroom’s by first-year University Students in one blended learning subject (Spanish Language) is analyzed. The results reveals significant gaps from a formal, pragmatic and gender-appropriate point of view. To improve the communicative competence of writing emails, a didactic proposal for the classroom is made.