“I hope this email finds you well”: Exploring the role of GenAI in student-faculty email communication

Teachers and students are increasingly exploring how Generative AI (GenAI) tools can promote learning and increase efficiency in carrying out common communicative tasks in English as a second or foreign language. One important yet underexplored domain is student-faculty email communication, a genre where learners are expected to manage linguistic fluency, pragmatic appropriateness, and interpersonal decorum associated with hierarchical student-faculty relationships. The present study investigates how Chinese learners of English use DeepSeek to compose their emails and examines faculty members’ perceptions of GenAI-assisted emails in comparison to students’ self-written ones. Students (N = 53) from three English-medium universities in China completed two email-writing tasks, wherein their prompts fed to DeepSeek were recorded and categorized using Flower and Hayes’ (1981) framework. Results showed that students rarely engaged GenAI for planning, but adopted a generate-then-refine strategy. This quantitative process data was triangulated with survey and interview data on student and faculty perceptions. Students viewed GenAI as easy to use and valuable for demonstrating politeness and clarity, although they also noted limitations such as overly formal or verbose phrasing. Faculty members rated GenAI-assisted emails as more polite and professional but not necessarily clearer or more persuasive, and some raised concerns that overly polished language might reduce the sense of personal voice. The findings provide new insights into how GenAI is reshaping the writing process for academic email communication, while also revealing a tension between student and faculty perceptions of GenAI-assisted writing.