Intercultural email negotiation of a PhD opportunity: a study of Saudi research students in Australia

Although negotiation via email takes place frequently between students and their supervisors, the underlying processes of these negotiations have not been adequately addressed in linguistic literature to date (Alsharif & Alyousef, 2017). Important gaps remain in relation to understanding the nature of academic negotiations. The primary purpose of this study is to examine politeness and impoliteness conventions in persuasive discourse and ways to assess academic negotiation across culture and gender, focusing on form and content. To this end, this project analysed 120 emails sent from Saudi (100) and Australian (20) students to prospective PhD supervisors, with equal numbers of men and women in the Saudi data. The main question of the project was: How do Saudi students negotiate finding a prospective PhD supervisor in Australia via email? The study was largely guided by old and new perspectives on politeness, along with cross-disciplinary theories and approaches from applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, genre, intercultural and business studies to understand the complexity of the e-negotiation texts and provide a means to analyse academic emails. Persuasion theory was used to help divide each email into three main categories based on the amount of rational, credible and affective/emotional appeals implemented by participants. There were three variables in this thesis used to assess discursive differences: power, gender and culture. The findings demonstrate the need for a multidimensional methodology to assess a broader range of linguistic and rhetorical features so as to adequately account for cultural and gender variations. Regarding cultural differences, one finding suggests that Australian students provide more content in terms of their planned PhD topic, while Saudi students generally focus on their CV and achievements. As for gender differences, the results challenge traditional findings of other studies: the Saudi men used more compliments, greetings and affective language due to the power imbalance, reflecting the Saudi communicative style of Kalafah. Saudi women used more credibility appeals, such as self-promotion, to position themselves as confident and capable of conducting PhD research. This thesis has contributed to the exploration of Saudi cultural schemata in negotiation styles, which was largely undiscovered. It suggests new ways through which persuasion, as part of genre, can be implemented in politeness research to unpack specific (im)polite speech acts, such as requestive behaviour. The results of this study provide deeper insights into electronic negotiation discourse as a whole and the subtle nuances of intercultural online communication in particular, especially as far as Anglo-Arabic interactions are concerned. From a pedagogical and contribution perspective, the thesis provides the background and foundations for the future creation of training materials to assist both hopeful Saudi PhD candidates and Australian institutes that receive thousands of Saudi students annually. The current findings and discoveries contribute to filling a wide gap in the contemporary literature, which has largely ignored a holistic linguistic investigation of negotiation and politeness from the dimensions of content and form.