The study aims to investigate the level of pragmatic competence of Romanian learners of English when performing requests in academic email interaction. It focuses on the analysis of the linguistic form of authentic email requests written by students of USARB (Alecu Russo Balti State University) to faculty. The study examines the way politeness is expressed in academic email requests by analysing the level of directness employed, as well as the use of internal modification of the head act of request. The findings reveal cases of negative transfer of strategies from students’ mother tongue into English. This stresses the need for pragmatic instruction, which will contribute to developing the EFL learners’ pragmatic competence.