Twitter Is Not the Enemy of the English Language

Contrary to all the LOLs, emoticons and hashtags happening in feeds across the Twittersphere, Twitter isn't destroying the English language, it's making it better. The medium only allows for 140 character musings, lending itself to abbreviations that don't exactly follow conventional spelling or grammar rules. Linguist Noam Chomsky finds the whole thing appalling, calling it "very shallow communication" in an interview with DC blog Brightest Young Things. "It requires a very brief, concise form of thought and so on that tends toward superficiality and draws people away from real serious communication … It is not a medium of a serious interchange," he told Jeff Jetton. But while a few language snobs are in Chomsky's camp, the rest of the linguistic community doesn't exactly agree.

Twitter is all about slang and abbreviations, but it's just not eroding the English language. In fact, University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman found the exact opposite: It's making it better. Some assume that Twitter using kids on the Interwebs are getting used to speaking in short bursts filled with non-sensical slang terms and therefore cannot communicate like the sophisticates of the olden days. "Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us," explained actor Ralph Fiennes, noted The Telegraph. Liberman decided to look into this so called word shortening phenomenon that's happening and it turns out to be completely false. Liberman compared recent tweets from Penn newspaper The Daily Pennsylvanian's Twitter feed to text from Hamlet. "The mean word length in Hamlet (in modern spelling) was 3.99 characters; in P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, the mean word length was 4.05 characters; in the DP‘s tweets, the mean word length was 4.80 characters," he found, writing on linguistic blog Language Log.

And even if the type of communication doesn't live up to Chomsky's lofty English ideals, it might not matter much. It's a 21st century language tool and other linguists aren't about to ignore it. Feeds have become a research hub for others looking to study language and mood, as The New York Times's Ben Zimmer points out. "Social scientists can simply take advantage of Twitter’s stream to eavesdrop on a virtually limitless array of language in action," he writes. And they have. Linguists have looked at phenomenons like Twitter moods and Arab revolutions. Beyond mood and revolutions though, linguists have started to study the actual changes to the English language via Twitter. Zimmer points to a study by Carnegie Mellon researches that mapped regional language use across the country. "Like the profusion of hella as a form of emphasis in Northern California, as in, 'It’s hella cold out there,'" explains Zimmer. The study garnered criticism, but this is the type of research linguists do and Twitter just makes it that much easier, continues Zimmer. "The amount of data available for analysis is many orders of magnitude bigger than what could be collected with traditional dialect surveys," he writes. Whether Chomsky approves or not, Twitter's happening and it's really not all that bad. Language evolves, Twitter's just making it easier to track what's happening.

REBECCA GREENFIELD

Not Digital "Natives" & "Immigrants" but "Visitors" & "Residents"

Many of us have heard of the so-called Digital Natives / Immigrants divide (if not, read Digital Natives: Fact or Fiction?). In this post, David White, a researcher at Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL), an award-winning e-learning research and development group in the University of Oxford, introduces us to an alternative distinction: that of Digital Visitors and Residents.

At TALL, we have been taking a close look not at what technologies our students use but at how they use them. We found that our students could not be usefully categorised as Digital Natives or Digital Immigrants – i.e. this distinction does not help guide the implementation of technologies, it simply provides the excuse that “some people ‘just don’t get it’ which is why your new approach has failed so badly…”

Anyway, our students’ appropriation of online services did not seem to follow a simple pattern based on skill level. It seemed to depend on whether they saw the web as a ‘place to live’ or as a collection of useful tools. This underlying motivation led us to outline two main categories of distance learning student.

The ‘Resident’

The resident is an individual who lives a percentage of their life online. The web supports the projection of their identity and facilitates relationships. These are people who have a persona online which they regularly maintain. This persona is normally primarily in a social networking sites but it is also likely to be in evidence in blogs or comments, via image sharing services etc. The Resident will, of course, interact with all the practical services such as banking, information retrieval and shopping etc but they will also use the web to socialise and to express themselves. They are likely to see the web as a worthwhile place to put forward an opinion. They often use the web in all aspects of the of their lives; professionally, for study, and for recreation. In fact, the resident considers that a certain portion of their social life is lived out online. The web has become a crucial aspect of how they present themselves and how they remain part of networks of friends or colleagues.

The ‘Visitor’

The Visitor is an individual who uses the web as a tool in an organised manner whenever the need arises. They may book a holiday or research a specific subject. They may choose to use a voice chat tool, such as Skype, if they have friends or family abroad. Often the Visitor puts aside a specific time to go online rather than sitting down at a screen to maintain their presence at any point during the day. They always have an appropriate and focused need to use the web but don’t ‘reside’ there. They are sceptical of services that offer them the ability to put their identity online and don’t feel the need to express themselves by participating in online culture in the same manner as a Resident.

In effect, the Resident has a presence online which they are constantly developing while the Visitor logs on, performs a specific task and then logs off.

How is this different from Digital ‘Natives’ and ‘Immigrants’?

This is, of course, not a polar distinction. There is a spectrum of which the Resident and the Visitor represent two extremes. It is a useful distinction because it is not based on gender or age. While our data would indicate that the portion of the population over 55 is predominantly made up of Visitors, there are examples of Residents in this section of the demographic. Similarly, it is the case that not everyone younger than 25 is a Resident.

It is not always easy to spot who is in each category, as the level of sophistication with which a Visitor might use any single service might well be greater than that of a Resident. Again, this is not a skill-based distinction. In fact, I know of at least one ed-tech researcher who considers himself to be a Visitor out of choice.

The Resident is likely to have arranged some sort of system to manage the relationship between services and the flow of information through their browser but this does not mean that they will be any more effective at researching a specific topic than a Visitor. This is why data from a survey that simply asks what online services a group of students use is next to useless.

How does this distinction affect learners?

This Visitor-Resident distinction is useful when considering which technologies to provide for online learners.

For example, if your learners are mainly Visitors, they are unlikely to take advantage of any feed-based system (such as RSS feeds) for aggregated information you may put in place. They are also unlikely to blog or comment as part of a course. The Resident will expect to have the opportunity to offer opinions on topics and to socialise around a programme of study. In fact, they are likely to find ways of doing this even if they are not ‘officially’ provided. We offered membership of a Facebook group to our students as they left their online courses. The majority signed up without question, as they wanted to stay in touch with fellow students and continue discussions. The remainder saw the group as pointless and a possible invasion of privacy.

Both sides of this argument are correct… It’s a question of approach and motivation, hence Visitors and Residents.

This article was originally posted on the TALL blog and has only undergone minor changes for this blog. More information about Digital Visitors and Residents can be found in Visitors and Residents: The Video by David White.

Clases de Inglés en Bahía Blanca

Se dictan clases particulares y de apoyo de inglés en Bahía Blanca para niños, adolescentes y adultos. Se prepara a los alumnos para rendir exámenes finales en el "Instituto Oxford de Cultura Inglesa de Bahía Blanca". Se les entregan certificados al finalizar el año.
También se prepara a los alumnos universitarios para que rindan el examen de suficiencia de inglés de la UNS (Universidad Nacional del Sur).
Las clases presenciales se pueden complementar con clases "online" por medio de Skype. Este sistema está diseñado para que los alumnos puedan practicar el idioma desde la comodidad de su hogar, utilizando material complementario y personalizado de acuerdo a las necesidades de cada uno.
Consultar por precios y formas de pago comunicándose al teléfono: 154-251613.
Muchas gracias.

A vision of K-12 students today

I teach, therefore you learn, or do you?

Happy New Year / Feliz Año Nuevo

I wish all of you a very Happy New Year, full of hopes and new ideas.
Les deseo a todos ustedes un muy Feliz Año Nuevo, lleno de esperanzas y nuevas ideas.

How Is the Internet Changing English?

Twenty years ago this week the British inventor Tim Berners-Lee created the world’s first webpage. It is worth pausing to consider the extraordinary impact that his invention has had on the English language.

Everyday words like google, unfriend and app simply didn't exist in 1990.

Even more words have had unexpected shifts in meaning in those two decades. If you had mentioned tweeting to an English-speaker a few years ago, he would have assumed you were talking about bird noises, not the use of the microblogging site Twitter.

Long ago, if someone lived online, it didn't mean they spent every waking minute on the internet, but that they travelled around with the rail network.

And wireless still means, to anyone of a certain age, a radio - not the system for retrieving internet pages without wires.

"The internet is an amazing medium for languages," said David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor. "Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly."

English is a remarkably inclusive language, and if words continue to be used for at least five years they generally end up in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Grammatically correct? An LOLcat.

But less accepted are the peculiar dialects that have sprung up amongst some users. For example, 'LOLcat' is a phonetic, grammatically-incorrect caption that accompanies a picture of a cat, like "I'm in ur bed zleeping".

In an article called "Cats Can Has Grammar" the blogger Anil Dash referred to LOLcat as "kitty pidgin". But does something like LOLcat have the staying power to become an accepted form of English?

Not according to Professor Crystal. "They are all clever little developments used by a very small number of people - thousands rather than millions. Will they be around in 50 years' time? I would be very surprised."

Taken from BBC UK China