Electronic Etiquette during the Pandemic: Theory and Practice of Teaching

In 2020 the coronavirus pandemic reached almost every country in the world and challenged their educational systems. This situation forced educators to shift to an online mode of teaching overnight. Many academic institutions that were earlier reluctant to change their traditional pedagogical approaches had no other option but to shift entirely to online teaching and learning. Thus, the role of ICTs in education, and email communication, in particular, has increased dramatically during the pandemic. A significant part of the educational process has turned to correspondence of students and teachers by corporate mail, to communication in chats and during online conferences. At the same time, students' lack of knowledge of electronic etiquette was revealed. They do not realise that writing status-congruent emails is a skill that requires high pragmatic competence and awareness of politeness conventions and email etiquette (also known as 'netiquette'). It turned out that most students had no ideas of electronic communication rules and did not observe even basic rules of electronic communication. So, students of two universities (teacher training and technical) were given a questionnaire on electronic etiquette. Then the authors analysed and compared students' answers and came up with recommendations on teaching electronic etiquette to students based on the test results. These recommendations can be further used in teaching practices, during English classes mostly. Keywords: higher education, online learning, technology, information and communication technologies, email, electronic etiquette.