SUMMARY
The present study investigates the use of external modifiers in requests and complaints as a strategy of facework (Goffman, 1967) in academic email communication, in the asymmetric relationship (student-faculty staff). The aim of this study is to understand communicative behaviors that could affect senders and recipients’ social face in academic e-mail communication. A total of 474 emails were elicited electronically and written by university students in Spain and first year Spanish FL learners in Sweden. The corpus shows differences in students’ communicative behaviors related to facework in situations of requests and complaints. This corpus was contrasted with data collected from: 1) an evaluation of pragmatic appropriateness in the Spanish FL texts, conducted by 6 external raters, 2) a retrospective questionnaire for Spanish FL learners, and 3) a questionnaire of pragmatic habits for the native speakers’ students in Spain. The findings indicate pragmatic variation between the groups in their communicative behavior regarding their use of external modifiers, as well as discrepancies in their perceptions of facework.