Epistolary Education in 21st Century: A System to Support Composition of E -mails by Students to Superiors in J apanese (2020)

Abstract: E-mail is a communication tool widely used by people of all ages on the Internet today, often in business and formal situations, especially in Japan. Moreover, Japanese E-mail communication has a set of specific rules taught using specialized guidebooks. E-mail literacy education for many Japanese students is typically provided in a traditional, yet inefficient lecture-based way. We propose a system to support Japanese students in writing E-mails to superiors (teachers, job hunting representatives, etc.). We firstly make an investigation into the importance of formal E-mails in Japan, and what is needed to successfully write a formal E-mail. Next, we develop the system with accordance to those rules. Finally, we evaluated the system twofold. The results, although performed on a small number of samples, were generally positive, and clearly indicated additional ways to improve the system.

## introduction the development of modern means of internet communication, such as social networking services (sns), like facebook ( https://www.facebook.com/ ), applications for direct chatting, like messenger ( https://www.messenger.com/ ), exchange of short messages, like twitter ( https://twitter.com/ ), images and videos, like instagram ( https://www.instagram.com/ ), or tiktok ( https://www.tiktok.com/ ), fave not diminished the importance of text-based communication, as most of communication on the internet today is still text-based. moreover, each of such applications creates unique differences in the language use @xcite . however, the general trend in language use across all such platforms is the colloquialisation of language, or using the language in an informal manner. differently to the above, the electronic mail, or e-mail has become a communication tool used by people of all ages recently mostly as a formal means of communication @xcite . moreover, in the context of japanese society, the e-mail, especially when used in formal situations, has a specific set of rules, manners and style, to the extent that specialized guidebooks are required to learn those 12 . however, for many japanese students it is difficult to learn an effective way of writing e-mails without a proper language education, which might result in the person not finding a job after graduating the university. typically, e-mail writing education would include lectures where the participants study under the guidance of a teacher. however, this traditional method is inefficient as one lecture is too short to provide support to individual learners, and the cost of finding an appropriate instructor is high. therefore, to support japanese students in e-mail literacy self-education, in this study, we propose a novel system for the support of writing japanese e-mails by students to superiors. the paper is organized as follows. we firstly describe the importance of formal e-mails in japan, and what are the core rules and elements of a successfully written formal e-mail. next, we describe the system and its implementation with accordance to those core rules. furthermore, we provide the results of initial experiments aiming to evaluate the level of e-mail writing skills among japanese students. last section concludes the paper and sets paths for further improvement of the system and its implementation in practice in the educational system. the system is available at m2052400085@std.kitami-it.ac.jp . when testing, send an email with "test for e-mail composition support system" in the subject line of the e-mail. ## conclusion and future work in this paper, we described an e-mail composition support system aimed to be used as an educational tool for japanese students to increase their e-mail literacy. the development of this system was stemmed by two factors, namely, (1) the importance for the young people in japan to master e-mail literacy, and (2) the deficiency in its education in reality. the twofold evaluation of the system showed positive results, and clearly indicated ways to further improve the system. in the near future we plan to implement this system in the educational curriculum for the classes on communication literacy, which will also allow additional robust evaluation on at least five hundred students.