Literacies of Bilingual Youth: A Profile of Bilingual Academic, Social, and TXT Literacies

This dissertation identifies three types of language skills that urban Spanish/English bilingual youth possess (academic, social, and texting language), and reports on their relationship while documenting and analyzing the features of text messaging among this population. 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 (communicating via SMS and iMessage). 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 available at www.byts.commons.gc.cuny.ed

Making "fetch" happen: The influence of social and linguistic context on nonstandard word growth and decline

In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech community. But unlike other types of innovation, language change is shaped and constrained by the system in which it takes part. To investigate the links between social and structural factors in language change, we undertake a large-scale analysis of nonstandard word growth in the online community Reddit. We find that dissemination across many linguistic contexts is a sign of growth: words that appear in more linguistic contexts grow faster and survive longer. We also find that social dissemination likely plays a less important role in explaining word growth and decline than previously hypothesized

OMG! l2spell online: The creative vocabulary of cyberlanguage s(~_^)--b

Increasing use of the Internet has led to a proliferation of online communication and information sharing media. These media, each with its own set of affordances and limitations, are thought to encourage new ways to communicate. Interlocutors refashion general English into abbreviated and often pictographic representations of existing concepts. Prior research has made suppositions about the effects these media have on communication; for example, that synchronous media (e.g., chat) encourage interlocutors to use more abbreviations (e.g., acronyms) than in asynchronous media (e.g., email). These suppositions, however, have not been fully tested because most studies focus on a single medium. Yet a more comprehensive understanding of this language--hereafter referred to as cyberlanguage--as it manifests across various online media is needed as users increasingly employ the Internet for communications. Furthermore, such an understanding may help information professionals improve information tools (e.g., search engines, summarization, surveillance) that currently rely on more standard forms of writing for their success. The research described here addresses this need by creating and linguistically analyzing a corpus of texts containing 136,529 tokens (23,912 types) that span multiple media (forums, email, text messaging, instant messaging, and chat) and communication situations (business, virtual reference, hobbies, health/well-being). Terms were classified according to linguistic feature (e.g., acronyms, emoticons). Chi-square tests were used to compare the frequencies of features across media and communication situation. Contrary to current thinking abut technological determinism, results show that cyberlanguage feature use varies based on medium and situation, which validates the notion that technology and other situational variables exert influence over communication behavior. New terms are being created all the time online and this suggests rapid language change and linguistic creativity. Interlocutors create new terms to bridge the physical distance between them, such as using surrogate face-to-face cues to make the text seem more like face-to-face speech. However, some cyberlanguage terms and features are quite ordinary and conventional, and may be considered online staples. The number of tokens that contained cyberlanguage features assumed a small portion of the language used online, so fears about cyberlanguage signaling the demise of proper English can be allayed.Doctor of Philosoph

Peaze Up! Adaptation, Innovation, and Variation in German Hip Hop Discourse

In this study, I investigate the stylistic use of various forms of the hip hop leave-taking peace in a 12.5-million-word corpus (2000-2011) of German-language Internet hip hop discussions. The English orthography is compared with a number of hybrid variants including, e.g., , , and . I analyze the distribution of these variants over time by comparison to use of the form in an American hip hop forum. I complement these results with a qualitative analysis of peace and its variants as situated in discourse, drawing a connection between linguistic features, discursive use, and corpus distribution. The discourse of German hip hop fans in new media forms is characterized by hybridity and heterogeneity, and is thus best investigated using similarly diverse methodologies. Through the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, I find that stylization is not the sole motivation for the alternative forms of peace; linguistic-orthographic considerations are also paramount

Word analysis skills in the intermediate grades.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Boston University

The emergence of American English as a discursive variety

Do speakers’ identity constructions influence the emergence of new varieties of a language? This question is at the heart of a debate about how the process of the emergence of postcolonial varieties of English can best be modeled. This volume contributes to the debate by linking it to models and theories proposed by anthropological linguists, sociolinguists and discourse linguists who view identity as a social and cultural phenomenon that is produced through linguistic and other social practices. Language is seen as essential for identity constructions because speakers use linguistic forms that index social ‘personae’ as well as specific social practices and values to convey an image of self to other speakers. Based on the theory of enregisterment that models the cultural and discursive process of the creation of indexical links between linguistic forms and social values, the argument is made that any model of the emergence of new varieties needs to differentiate carefully between a structural level and a discursive level. What emerges on the discursive level as a result of processes of enregisterment is a ‘discursive variety’. The volume illustrates how the emergence of a discursive variety can be systematically studied in a historical context by focusing on the enregisterment of American English as it can be observed in nineteenth-century U.S. newspapers. Using a discourse-linguistic methodological framework and two large databases containing close to 78 million newspaper articles, the study reveals a complex pattern of indexical links between the phonological forms /h/-dropping and -insertion, yod-dropping, a lengthened and backened bath vowel, non-rhoticity, a realization of prevocalic /r/ as a labiodental approximant as well as the lexical items baggage and pants on the one hand and social values centering around nationality, authenticity and non-specificity on the other hand. Qualitative analyses uncover the social personae associated with the linguistic forms (e.g. the American cowboy, the African American mammy and the ‘Anglo-maniac’ American dude), while quantitative analyses trace the development over time and show that the enregisterment processes were widespread and not restricted to a particular region

The emergence of American English as a discursive variety

Do speakers’ identity constructions influence the emergence of new varieties of a language? This question is at the heart of a debate about how the process of the emergence of postcolonial varieties of English can best be modeled. This volume contributes to the debate by linking it to models and theories proposed by anthropological linguists, sociolinguists and discourse linguists who view identity as a social and cultural phenomenon that is produced through linguistic and other social practices. Language is seen as essential for identity constructions because speakers use linguistic forms that index social ‘personae’ as well as specific social practices and values to convey an image of self to other speakers. Based on the theory of enregisterment that models the cultural and discursive process of the creation of indexical links between linguistic forms and social values, the argument is made that any model of the emergence of new varieties needs to differentiate carefully between a structural level and a discursive level. What emerges on the discursive level as a result of processes of enregisterment is a ‘discursive variety’. The volume illustrates how the emergence of a discursive variety can be systematically studied in a historical context by focusing on the enregisterment of American English as it can be observed in nineteenth-century U.S. newspapers. Using a discourse-linguistic methodological framework and two large databases containing close to 78 million newspaper articles, the study reveals a complex pattern of indexical links between the phonological forms /h/-dropping and -insertion, yod-dropping, a lengthened and backened bath vowel, non-rhoticity, a realization of prevocalic /r/ as a labiodental approximant as well as the lexical items baggage and pants on the one hand and social values centering around nationality, authenticity and non-specificity on the other hand. Qualitative analyses uncover the social personae associated with the linguistic forms (e.g. the American cowboy, the African American mammy and the ‘Anglo-maniac’ American dude), while quantitative analyses trace the development over time and show that the enregisterment processes were widespread and not restricted to a particular region

Orthographic practices in SMS text messaging as a case signifying diachronic change in linguistic and semiotic resources

From 1998, SMS text messaging diffused in the UK from an innovation associated with a small minority, mainly adolescents, to a method of written communication practised routinely by people of all ages and social profiles. From its earliest use, and continuing to the time of writing in 2015, SMS texting has attracted strong evaluation in public sphere commentary, often focused on its spelling. This thesis presents analysis of SMS orthographic choice as practised by a sample of adolescents and young adults in England, with data collected between 2000 and 2012. A threelevel analytical framework attends to the textual evidence of SMS orthographic practices in situated use; respondents’ accounts of their choices of spelling in text messaging as a literacy practice; and the metadiscursive evaluation of text messaging spelling in situated interaction and in the public sphere. I present analysis of a variety of representations of SMS orthographic choice, including facsimile texts, electronic corpus data, questionnaire survey responses and transcripts of recorded interviews. This mixed methods empirical approach enables a cross-verified, longitudinal perspective on respondents’ practices, and on the wider significance of SMS orthographic choice, as expressed in private and public commentary. I argue that the spelling used in SMS exemplifies features, patterns, and behaviours, which are found in other forms of digitally-mediated interaction, and in previous and concurrent vernacular literacy practices. I present SMS text messaging as one of the intertextually-related forms of self-published written interaction which mark a diachronic shift towards re-regulated forms of orthographic convention, so disrupting attitudes to standard English spelling. I consider some implications represented by SMS spelling choice for the future of written conventions in standardised English, and for teaching and learning about spelling and literacy in formal educational settings

“Local, but intelligent”: Language Ideologies in the Informant Biographies of the Linguistic Atlas Project

This thesis argues for the relevance of the Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP) for studies of language ideologies, indexicality, and enregisterment. The LAP represents the largest dialect survey of North American English to date, offering an abundance of historical linguistic data for research in dialectology, linguistic geography, and variation over space and time. Additionally, the LAP also contains additional sources of sociolinguistic data, including informant biographies — documents written by fieldworkers at the conclusion of the LAP interview that summarize an informant’s demographic profile, as well as their personality, speech, and caliber as an interviewee. Rife with subjective judgments from the fieldworker, informant biographies present the opportunity for the study of language ideologies in the LAP. This thesis performs a qualitative discourse analysis of 583 informant biographies collected as part of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS). Focusing on analysis of pragmatic features, this study reveals the ways that language ideologies, indexicality, and enregisterment are encoded into informant biographies and the LAP more broadly. This analysis suggests that linguistic data in the LAP can be understood as products of an indexical, ideological, and enregistered negotiation of language and identity, co-constructed between informants and fieldworkers

Reader Response in the Digital Age. Letters to the editor vs. below-the-line comments. A synchronic comparison.

Heralded by some as the biggest revolution of the Internet, with great egalitarian and democratic potential, web 2.0 and social media are frowned on by others as sites where users constantly compete to take centre stage, more often than not by sharing everyday banalities, thus flooding the web with “tedious piffle”. While it is true that it has never been so easy to put in your two cents’ worth, the concept of user-generated content – one of the buzzwords of today’s participatory web – can look back on a long tradition in newspapers, where letters to the editor have always been a highly popular way for readers to make their voices heard in public. In their move online, most newspapers added comment sections to their websites, thus taking readers’ letters to the digital level and providing the basis for the present synchronic study, which compares 1,000 below-the-line comments posted on the websites of the Guardian and the Times to 1,000 letters to the editor written to the same newspapers by addressing, one by one, four common claims about, or (mis-)conceptions of, this form of user-generated content. The analysis begins on the micro-linguistic level, comparing the data sets in terms of their orthographic, typographic, lexical and syntactic features and addressing the claim that the language used to communicate on the Internet differs substantially from the language used in other contexts. The focus then shifts to the interactional structures found in the two genres and the question of whether below-the-line comments, as a form of web 2.0, are really more interactive than traditional letters to the editor, which are commonly perceived as a means of ‘talking back’ to the newspaper or journalist rather than a forum for interactive debates among users. The discussion then moves on to matters of face, (im-)politeness and identity construction by first investigating the face-threatening act of criticising others as well as the act of providing positive feedback. This analysis was inspired by the fact that the two genres, although clearly related, are perceived very differently: while comment sections are often associated with aggressive and uninhibited verbal behaviour and numerous calls for their closure can be found, such concerns have not been voiced about letters pages in newspapers. Moreover, it has been claimed that via online comments, more and more private topics are entering the public sphere, thus leading to an increase in subjectivity and personalisation. This last claim is addressed by exploring strategies of personalisation and the moves used to construct an expert identity. The comparative analysis is thus concluded with a focus on the domain of social behaviour, investigating the different means contributors employ to create their own identity and that of the people talked about or addressed