Intercultural Communication and Misunderstanding: Pragmatic Mismatches in Academia

In today’s globalized universities, students and professors are from different cultural backgrounds. Academic English is the shared code but the pragmatic norms very across cultures. This study explores how students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds communicate with professors through email. Using a scenario-based questionnaire, we examine the pragmatic strategies, politeness conventions, and levels of directness that students naturally apply when composing academic emails.
The goal is not to judge any style as correct or incorrect, but to understand how cultural norms shape the way we communicate in academic settings and how these differences can lead to pragmatic mismatches.