New perspectives on language and gender: Linguistic prescription and compliance in call centres

Despite a shift to service-based economies, male-dominated, high-status workplaces have been the predominant focus of research into language and gender in the workplace. This study redresses this shortcoming by considering one female-dominated, low-status, highly regimented workplace that is emblematic of the globalized service economy: call centres. Drawing on 187 call centre service interactions, institutional documents, interviews, and observations from call centres in two national contexts, the study employs an innovative combination of quantitative and qualitative discourse-analytic techniques to compare rule compliance of male and female workers. Female agents in both national contexts are found to comply more with the linguistic prescriptions despite managers and agents emphatically denying the relevance of gender. The study offers a new perspective on language and gender, pointing to the need to expand the methodologies and theories currently favoured to understand how language perpetuates occupational segregation in twenty-first-century workplaces

Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey

Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics" that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the relation between language and social identity, language use in social interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication: 18th February, 201

Relevance of Linguistic Landscape to Intercultural Competence Development in the context of Situated Learning

Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00

Qualitative and mixed methodology for online language teaching research

This paper provides an overview of CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning), its history and current developments. It presents a rationale for moving CALL research forward, and outlines a particular approach to researching online language teaching and learning: the use of qualitative methodology. It is in this historical context that a case for more qualitative and integrative research designs is made. Examples of qualitative and mixed method studies are taken from the context of language teaching at the Open University in the United Kingdom, the largest institution of its kind in Europe, with a remit of teaching all subjects at university level to adults, regardless of their prior qualifications. With the help of these examples the scope and promise of qualitative approaches are discussed

Code Choice Used by the Employees in the Communication with the Superior and the Co-worker

This study is about the choice of codes used by the employees in communicating with their superior and their co-worker. The thing that has caught the writer's attention and curiosity to write on this particular topic is the language that is used by the employees in a work place like switching when they talk to the superior and the co-worker. The aims of this study were to describe and to analyze the codes which were used by the employees, to find out the dominant code they chose, and to explain what factors affected their choice of code. Through the analysis, the writer found that the employees chose to use standard or casual Indonesian codes in communicating with their superior. Whereas they used Javanese codes in communicating among themselves

Taboo Words in Pop, Rock, and Hip Hop Songs Medan

The study deals with the Taboo words uttered by the singer of pop, rock, and hip hop songs . The objective of this study was to identify the kinds and the reason of taboo words used by the songs in pop, rock, and hip hop genres. The source of the data was lyrics of three lates album in recent five years (2010-2015) which lead three genres; Miley Cyrus for pop, Linkin Park for rock, and Nicki Minaj for hip hop. Each of singers brought five songs as the data. The data were collected by selecting lyrics containing taboo words after listening the song and matching the lyrics from internet carefully. The results of this study were four kinds of taboo words; offensive slang, profanity, sexual referent, and scatological referent occured in the songs and the most dominant kinds of taboo word appeared was offensive slang