For the past decades, cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics have focused on native and non-native speech act descriptions, and only a small number of studies have investigated the cognitive processes involved in speech act productions. To bridge the gap, the present study examined the cognitive processes of L2 learners engaged in an email task involving two requests to faculty. Concurrent and retrospective verbal reports were collected from 15 pairs of intermediate-level Chinese EFL learners and were analyzed in terms of intention, cognition, planning and evaluation. The analysis identified that when responding to the email task, the learners adopted various politeness strategies to express their requestive intentions, and focused their attention on lexical, grammatical and situational features of the task. In addition, the learners planned their emails systematically in the order of Greeting, Message and Closing, and evaluated their performances in terms of degree of politeness and the persuasiveness of their reasons. This study concludes with suggestions for future research and pedagogy.
