“Hello and Good Day to you Dear Dr. …” Greetings and Closings in Supervisors-supervisees Email Exchanges

Email is nowadays one of the fastest means of communication in academic settings like universities. Despite widespread email usage, lack of netiquette in institutionalised e-mail communication between students and faculty member is noted, in particular between students and their supervisors. Politeness and impoliteness in academic email greetings and closings has yet to receive the attention they deserve. The purpose of the present study is to examine the different norms of openings (greetings, salutations, forms of address) and closings, which Iranian Post-Graduate Students use to communicate with Malaysian academics in the University of Malaya. The result indicates that Iranian students while employing different forms of address pay more attention to greetings rather than closings.