Student–Teacher Communication in Digital Higher Education

Politeness, Implicature, and Institutional Interaction

Bibliographic Data

ID22043706
AuthorsGabriel Bărbuleţ (0000-0002-9609-2573, 1 Decembrie 1918 University, corresponding author), Andra Iulia Ursa (0000-0002-2158-4338, 1 Decembrie 1918 University), Valentin Todescu (1 Decembrie 1918 University)
Year2026
Volume16
Issue7
Pages1005
Publication date2026-06-25
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEducation Sciences (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2227-7102 • E-ISSN: 2227-7102
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/educsci16071005
OpenAlexW7165916351
LanguageEN
References cited22

This study investigates the linguistic mechanisms of politeness and conversational implicature in digital classroom interactions at “1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia (UAB), Romania. Rather the research adopts a corpus-based approach to analyze five authentic communicative situations extracted from institutional digital platforms (Moodle (version 4.3.2; R Core Team, 2023), Microsoft Teams, and institutional email exchanges) between academic staff and students during 2022–2024. The corpus comprises 247 naturally occurring discourse units. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, the study identifies recurrent patterns of face-threatening acts (FTAs), mitigation strategies, and implicature generation in asynchronous and synchronous digital contexts. The findings reveal that digital mediation creates a distinctive pragmatic register in which participants use compressed politeness strategies, exploit contextual ambiguity, and rely on shared institutional knowledge to convey and decode implicature. Crucially, the study situates its results within the broader framework of the Romanian higher education system, reflecting ongoing tensions between hierarchical academic culture and digitalization imperatives introduced in the post-pandemic educational environment. Recommendations for digital communication literacy training at an institutional level are provided

Asynchronous communication · Digital Literacy · Discourse analysis · Higher education · Implicature · Mediation · Politeness · Romanian · Digital Education and Society · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Literacy, Media, and Education

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Open DOIOpen Access