The hotel industry has been reaching their existing and prospecting customers via emails throughout a customer’s journey, from pre-arrival information/promotions to post-stay emails for the reviews (Huang, 2016). In different from other email marketing campaigns containing pure promotional materials for acquiring customers, post-stay e-mails can be used to send personalized messages and build an emotional connection with customers by thanking and rewarding their stays. As an increasing number of customers open and read emails via mobile devices on the move (Jordan, 2015), effectively designed post-stay emails with persuasive messages can be a powerful communicating method keeping customers in the lines of dialog with the brands. However, there is lack of studies on how the post-stay email marketing campaign works to retain customers. This study aimed to identify post-stay email features that affect customers’ intention to revisit the same hotel brand depending on their levels of involvement in choosing hotels for leisure purpose. Grounded on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), this study identified what causes “motivation” to process a post-stay email and which email features can be more effectively positioned to persuade consumers with different elaboration levels. This study developed hypotheses regarding the effects of email features on attitude and intention to revisit the hotel brands. A total of 189 responses was determined to be usable in this study. Using Path Analysis, this study tested multivariate regression model with direct effect of email features on attitude and indirect effects of email features on intention to revisit the hotel brand. In addition, this study tested a moderating effect of leisure involvement on the hypothesized paths. The results showed that consumers with a low level of leisure involvement tended to be influenced by financial and interactivity features on their attitude towards the hotel brand while personalization features yielded favorable attitude towards the hotel brand for consumers with a high level of leisure involvement. Attitude towards the hotel brand was a significant predictor of behavioral intention to revisit the hotel brand that sends post-stay emails in this study. Industry professionals and researchers can utilize this study to better design their e-mails as customer retention strategies. The email features analyzed in this study can be strategically included in the post-stay e-mail according to their target market. The initiative can assist in reinforcing or persuading their guests to revisit the hotel brand and build stronger customer relationships.

Ko, Bo-Ai. 2018. “Thematic Patterns in Formal Email Writing of Korean EFL College Learners”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 26(1). 31~59. This study explores the Theme types and the thematic progression in the formal email writings of Korean EFL college learners, based on the Theme-Rheme analytical framework of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). Data was collected from 99 college students, enrolled in an English Writing Composition course during the second semester of 2017 via a cyber university in Korea. Their main writing activity involved email writings in the form of requesting primarily based on the Genre Approach. Text analysis was conducted with the comparison of the high- scoring group (15), the medium-scoring group (15) and the low-scoring group (15), based on assessment of the course assignment. Employing the coding step of identifying the Theme and Rheme of each T-unit, the text analysis sought to figure out which Theme types were used for each T-unit and which thematic progression patterns were used for overall text flow and cohesion. The key finding was that there were certain discourse-specific thematic patterns of formal email writing. Among the range of thematic features, this study will highlight marked Themes, interpersonal Themes and thematic choices of nominalization for the purpose of formal email writing texts.

As a preliminary study for the effective development of a genre-focused English learner corpus, this article aims to investigate most frequent error types and their frequencies in English emails written by undergraduate freshmen in South Korea. Data for this study include English emails of 86 Korean students majoring in humanities or social science in a university located in Daegu. With the rise of Internet, ESL/EFL education has witnessed a growing interest in teaching email usage in composition courses, as it provides a variety of opportunities to evaluate language abilities including interpersonal and pragmatic abilities. The present article revealed that the most frequent error type was concerned with style, such as capitalization (28.7%) and punctuation (7.8%), which was followed by determiner deletion (6.3%), genre convention such as closing (3%), countability of nouns (3%), and verb choice (2.7%). Different error types and frequencies were identified according to different English proficiency levels (Korean SAT and TOEIC), which evidenced the need to include the English proficiency level annotation in the corpus design and to focus on different types of errors in class in accordance with learners’ proficiency levels.

The present study attempted to investigate any changes in a group of Korean undergraduate EFL students' perceptions on L2-L2 communication. Email exchanges with two different EFL groups were carried out. Chinese and Turkish EFL students were recruited for a Freshmen English course at a university located in South Korea. The students' initial, as well as post-study, perspectives on L2-L2 email exchanges, students' email messages, and their paragraph writing samples were collected for analysis. The major findings of the present study were the positive changes in the participants' perspectives on L2-L2 communication and their awareness of the need for more authentic L2-L2 communication opportunities in L2 learning. Also, L2-L2 email exchanges coupled with contextualized grammar lessons using participants' own email messages were particularly found useful, and the analysis of two selected participants’ paragraph samples showed improvement in their L2 writing. Suggestions for future research were also provided.

Many researchers called for a need to expose L2 learners to diverse writing contexts, and L2-L2 interactions using English as a communication tool became more common than communication with native English speakers. The present study introduced two groups of Korean university students to a task, for which they were grouped differently: the first with a group of students at a Chinese university and the second with Chinese students as well as students of a different Korean university. These groups performed a task that they selected from among three choices. In the process of their e-mail exchanges, the students' pre- and post-task perspectives were explored through two surveys. In addition, the students expressed their reflections regarding this experience in writing. Overall, the students seemed to consider this experience of exchanging emails with L2 students speaking a different L1 useful and it helped some students gain confidence in their ability to use English as a communication tool. This study provided an opportunity to expand the writing context in EFL classrooms.