Evgeniya Aleshinskaya

Although email correspondence is a common means of communication between scholars from different cultures, little attention is paid to writing academic emails in tertiary education. The present investigation is aimed at studying the influence of genre education on the formation of academic writing skills and understanding the principles of academic correspondence. The main methods used in the study were experiment and survey. The research was carried out on the basis of National Research Nuclear University MEPhI. The participants of the study were postgraduate (PhD) students (n = 100) with a major in Physics, Electronics, Computer Science, and other technical areas. The results of the study show that the students made considerable progress in their academic email writing skills even after a short period of explicit instruction applying the genre-based approach. Most of the students changed their way of thinking about writing emails for academic purposes in English and became aware of the norms of formal writing. Moreover, the results of the experiment and survey justify the necessity of including academic email writing in the curriculum of teaching Academic English and demonstrate strong potential of genre-based learning in other genres involving academic writing.