| 英文摘要 |
Email is a pervasive medium of communication across contemporary domains, making the development of email writing competence a crucial concern in language teaching. However, discourse analysis and pedagogical application targeting Chinese-language email writing remain limited. To address this gap in research, the present study adopts a move analysis approach to examine emails written by native speakers of Chinese, aiming to identify discourse structures and contextual factors so as to provide pedagogical guidelines for teaching email writing in the Chinese language. The analysis focuses on two recipient types (professors and peers) and four communicative purposes (request, invitation, gratitude, and refusal). The results show that all email types share a five-move structure: initiating communication, stating the purpose, supporting the purpose, projecting closure, and closing communication, within which multiple steps are realized. The opening and closing moves (Moves 1, 4, and 5) establish the interactional frame and primarily serve interpersonal functions, displaying relatively stable step patterns. In contrast, the moves in the middle of the structure (Moves 2 and 3) convey core content and simultaneously fulfill informational and interpersonal functions, with variations in internal step realization depending on the communication purpose. Cross-contextual comparisons further indicate that communicative purpose and social status jointly shape the complexity and indirectness of email discourse, while completeness and formality are largely conditioned by social status. Specifically, request and refusal emails rely more heavily on pragmatic strategies than invitation and gratitude emails, and emails addressed to professors consistently exhibit higher levels of politeness than those directed to peers. Drawing on these findings, the study proposes a five-move, ten-step pedagogical model that integrates the construction of discoursal and contextual knowledge. The results of an instructional experiment demonstrate that this model effectively facilitates learners’acquisition of writing conventions and provides a principled framework for their appropriate participation in Chinese-language email communities. |