Teaching Register to EFL Writers: Formality and Deference in Written Communication

While teaching written communication to international business school students in Korea, the author received an email from a student to lacked thoroughness and clarity. He decided to use the email as a learning opportunity for his students to rewrite it. He discovered that while the results were good, there was an inability to write in a register that was appropriate to the communicative task and cultural context. Register is an amorphous construct, but for the purposes of the lesson, it describes the balance between formality, deference, and the appropriateness of a writer's style to a given text. Finding the correct register for a text is a complex endeavor that includes, among other factors, sentence structure and word choice. But it also involves decisions about formality and whether to assume a deferential tone or to take a more authoritative stance. In this article, the author discusses challenges related to teaching register in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts and uses specific examples to suggest strategies to overcome those challenges.