Related Papers
Literacies of Bilingual Youth: A profile of bilingual academic, social, and txt literacies
Michelle McSweeney (Johnson)
This dissertation reports on a research project to identify the multiple types of language skills that urban emergent bilingual youth possess. The participants in this study are Spanish-dominant bilingual young adults enrolled in a high school completion program in New York City. They are in the process of developing both Spanish and English academic literacy skills, and it is well known that they tend to perform below the grade they are enrolled in. For this reason, they are often referred to as being “language-less” (DeCapua & Marshall, 2011; Freeman, Freeman, & Mercuri, 2002) in an academic setting. Yet, little was previously known about their linguistic skills in other language forms such as social and Txt. This research seeks to understand and document their abilities across language forms and modalities, painting a composite picture of non-traditional bilinguals students’ linguistic skills. The aims of this dissertation are achieved through three different approaches. The first is a quantitative study into participants’ literacy skills through the use of assessments measuring academic literacy and social language awareness across written, aural, and digital modalities. The second is an in-depth analysis of the features participants use when texting. Txt is a relatively new language form, and the analysis presented in this dissertation identifies the features and patterns that illustrate its systematic and constrained nature. The third approach is a case study focused on the texting behavior between two prolific texters. The theories developed based on the texting patterns of all participants (except those two texters) are applied to this one conversation for validation. This conversation constitutes more than half of the text messages that students contributed to the project, highlighting just how important this language form is in the daily life of young adults. A final component of this dissertation is the public availability of the text messages as an anonymized corpus along with the code and methods used to analyze the data. The text message corpus is included here as a .csv file as well as an SQL file. The code is included as a zipfile of my GitHub Repository. These files are also available at www.byts.commons.gc.cuny.edu
Languages
I Text English to Everyone: Links between Second-Language Texting and Academic Proficiency
2017 •
Languages _MDPI
This article reports on research investigating the relationship between text messaging and academic literacy among Spanish-dominant emergent bilingual young adults in New York City (acquiring English). Through assessments of academic language and analysis of a corpus of 44,597 text messages, this study found that emergent bilinguals who send more messages in English and choose English for the settings on their mobile phones tend to have higher academic English skills. This study also found that the English messages they send are lexically less dense than the Spanish messages, illustrating that students use a narrower vocabulary when texting in their second language. This finding is explored in light of previous research that has found that using social media in the target language can help students develop fluency and intercultural competence skills, but not always vocabulary. The results are discussed in terms of the tendency for texters to text monolingually and other affordances and constraints of smart phone use in digitally supporting second language acquisition
The Birth of a Language: The emergence of Txt as an independent language form.
Michelle McSweeney (Johnson)
The Pragmatics of CMC
Michelle McSweeney (Johnson)
Is textese a threat to traditional literacy? Dutch youths’ language use in written computer-mediated communication and relations with their school writing
2019 •
Lieke Verheijen
The impact of CMC on youths’ literacy goes beyond their traditional literacy skills: the entire concept of literacy has evolved because of new media. This chapter problematizes the seemingly straightforward notion of literacy, by focusing on how it has been reconceptualised in previous research, in light of the digital age which has emerged in recent decades. It discusses how the old literacies of reading and writing print-based texts have traditionally been defined and why many scholars felt that there was a need for a broader conceptualisation of literacy. The numerous ‘new literacies’ that have been coined as a response are examined, as well as definitions for these that have been proposed in the literature. Finally, we consider whether old and new, digital literacies can co-exist.
Journal of Writing Research
The impact of WhatsApp on Dutch youths' school writing and spelling
2021 •
Wilbert Spooren
This paper examines whether use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and non-standard informal written language therein harms youths’ literacy skills. An experiment was conducted with 500 Dutch youths of different educational levels and age groups to assess if social media use affects their school writings. It was measured if chatting via WhatsApp directly impacts youths’ performance on a narrative writing task, in terms of writing quality and spelling, or their ability to detect and correct deviations from the standard language in a grammaticality judgement task. WhatsApp use had a direct effect on the story writing task, but only on participants’ spelling: adolescents who were primed with WhatsApp immediately beforehand produced significantly fewer misspellings in their narratives. The present study thus gives no cause for concern about negative transfer from social media to school writing: if anything, CMC use may provide youths with greater orthographic awareness and positiv...
Lol! I didn’t mean it: Lol as a marker of illocutionary force
Michelle McSweeney (Johnson)
It is widely accepted that lol means laugh out loud, and it is also widely known that it rarely if ever refers to laughing (McWhorter, 2013). Lol appears in a wide variety of texted contexts, sometimes as a moment of laughter or an offer of empathy, at other times it appears to apply a sarcastic tone or ask for favors. In the Spanish/English BYTs (Bilingual Youth Texts) Corpus (a collection of over 50,000 text messages sent by urban young adults in 2015), it occurs in 12% of all messages, and is the most commonly used word in the entire corpus. For many researchers, it is the most identifiable item that signals the Txt register (Crystal, 2011; Uygur-Distexhe, 2014). Even the most recent work on this topic attempts to identify what lol means (Tagliamonte, 2016). By shifting our perspective just slightly and asking rather what lol does, its role in communication is readily apparent and has significant implications for the role that the Txt language register has on language more broadly. In this talk, I take the perspective that lol is a purely pragmatic particle signaling a mismatch between the locutionary force (literal meaning), and the illocutionary force (intended meaning) of a text message. By adopting this perspective, the seemingly disparate uses of lol are accounted for and its overwhelming presence in the Txt register is explained. As opposed to other pragmatic particles that do discourse work in text messaging (i.e., ok, which appears in 4% of all messages), lol evolved specifically to meet a linguistic need in Txt. The role that lol plays in text messaging is unique for English because unlike other pragmatic particles, it does not have a discourse function. Lol serves instead to overtly encode a pragmatic function that (in face-to-face conversations) is usually encoded non-verbally.
A Cross-Sectional Study of Textese in Academic Writing Magnitude of Penetration, Impacts and Perceptions
Abdu Al-kadi
The development of DOTI (Data of oral teletandem interaction)
Solange Aranha
Solange Aranha and Paola Leone discuss the creation of a special type of learner corpus that contains Voice-over-IP (VoIP) interactions in which an L2 learner and an expert in the target language meet on a weekly basis, and which are conducted partially in the learner’s L1 and partially in the learner’s L2 (Teledandem interactions). Research on the Teledandem system is growing rapidly, as it can help to better understand and foster various language learning processes. based on the example of the DOTI database, which is currently composed of 700 hours of video data from Teledandem sessions, the authors discuss the relevant metadata, especially the characteristics of the learning scenarios, the tasks and activities observed in these, and the CMC environment.
Reading and Writing
Is instant messaging the same in every language? A basque perspective
2016 •
Jasone Cenoz
