Post-modern ‘languagers’: the effects of texting by university students on three South African languages

The present post-modern society has witnessed a growth spurt in technology, and with the development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), mobile text messaging (texting) is now seen as the norm among the youth. For these late-modern languagers (Lytra and Jørgensen 2008: 5), it has become a common if not almost natural process to send and receive an SMS (Short Message Service) in different languages. Although some studies have examined the transformation and modification of the English language by mobile communication, hardly any, apart from Deumert and Masinyana (2008), have looked at how local South African languages are being reshaped and modified through this medium. Drawing on texting data from university undergraduate students, this paper examines the ways in which three South African languages – Afrikaans, isiXhosa and Setswana – are used, transformed and modified through this medium of communication. It is argued here that the intense creativity displayed by these young cell phone users as they play with the multilingual resources at their disposal may lead to some form of language revitalisation for these languages

Creating a Live, Public Short Message Service Corpus: The NUS SMS Corpus

Short Message Service (SMS) messages are largely sent directly from one person to another from their mobile phones. They represent a means of personal communication that is an important communicative artifact in our current digital era. As most existing studies have used private access to SMS corpora, comparative studies using the same raw SMS data has not been possible up to now. We describe our efforts to collect a public SMS corpus to address this problem. We use a battery of methodologies to collect the corpus, paying particular attention to privacy issues to address contributors' concerns. Our live project collects new SMS message submissions, checks their quality and adds the valid messages, releasing the resultant corpus as XML and as SQL dumps, along with corpus statistics, every month. We opportunistically collect as much metadata about the messages and their sender as possible, so as to enable different types of analyses. To date, we have collected about 60,000 messages, focusing on English and Mandarin Chinese.Comment: It contains 31 pages, 6 figures, and 10 tables. It has been submitted to Language Resource and Evaluation Journa

Exploring the experiences and coping strategies of international medical students

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Few studies have addressed the challenges that international medical students face and there is a dearth of information on the behavioural strategies these students adopt to successfully progress through their academic program in the face of substantial difficulties of language barrier, curriculum overload, financial constraints and assessment tasks that require high proficiency in communication skills.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>This study was designed primarily with the aim of enhancing understanding of the coping strategies, skill perceptions and knowledge of assessment expectations of international students as they progress through the third and fourth years of their medical degree at the School of Medicine, University of Tasmania, Australia.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Survey, focus group discussion and individual interviews revealed that language barriers, communication skills, cultural differences, financial burdens, heavy workloads and discriminatory bottlenecks were key factors that hindered their adaptation to the Australian culture. Quantitative analyses of their examination results showed that there were highly significant (p < 0.001) variations between student performances in multiple choice questions, short answer questions and objective structured clinical examinations (70.3%, 49.7% & 61.7% respectively), indicating existence of communication issues.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Despite the challenges, these students have adopted commendable coping strategies and progressed through the course largely due to their high sense of responsibility towards their family, their focus on the goal of graduating as medical doctors and their support networks. It was concluded that faculty needs to provide both academic and moral support to their international medical students at three major intervention points, namely point of entry, mid way through the course and at the end of the course to enhance their coping skills and academic progression. Finally, appropriate recommendations were made.</p

Autochthonous heritage languages and social media:writing and bilingual practices in Low German on Facebook

This article analyses how speakers of an autochthonous heritage language (AHL) make use of digital media, through the example of Low German, a regional language used by a decreasing number of speakers mainly in northern Germany. The focus of the analysis is on Web 2.0 and its interactive potential for individual speakers. The study therefore examines linguistic practices on the social network site Facebook, with special emphasis on language choice, bilingual practices and writing in the autochthonous heritage language. The findings suggest that social network sites such as Facebook have the potential to provide new mediatized spaces for speakers of an AHL that can instigate sociolinguistic change

Literacy and multilingualism in Africa

Literacy and multilingualism in Africa is approached here as a field of practice rather than a unified field of research. This field presents a crucial paradox: African contexts present some of the world’s most diverse and vital multilingual situations but also feature in the world’s poorest literacy rates and are routinely said to lack a literate tradition altogether. By reviewing Africa’s script inventions this chapter offers counter-evidence for this deceptive view. Throughout Africa – from the Maghreb over West and Central Africa to the Horn of Africa – there have been significant indigenous script traditions and inventions, including Tifinagh, N’ko, Vai, Bamum and Ge’ez. In fact, some of the world’s oldest known scripts (e.g. Egyptian hieroglyphs) are African scripts. The chapter further outlines two relatively young fields of practice and research that have begun to make major contributions to literacy and multilingualism in Africa: digital literacy and linguistic landscape. These fields share a common interest in the materiality of real language as opposed to idealized images of language and in local agency and creativity in the site of struggle that is language. Like digital language practices, linguistic landscapes constitute a domain for African written multilingualism that is not generally supported or monitored by African states. Nor does either field present simple continuities from colonially inherited language policies and ideologies, in the way that classrooms do. As spaces for writing par excellence linguistic landscapes and mobile phones promise to contribute in no minor way to the development of African language literacies and multilingualism in Africa

Global migration and social protection rights : the social and economic security of cross-border students in Australia

A growing number of students cross national borders for their studies. An expanding global market in higher education has been created. Yet significant gaps exist in the governance of international students’ rights. As well as being educational service beneficiaries, cross-border students are migrants, workers, consumers and human beings. A broader view of students, as individuals deserving of ‘social and economic security’, is superior to that which treats them as social protection subjects. Recognizing this multiple status, and utilizing in-depth data from 200 interviews with international students in Australia, the article finds that the existing social protection regime falls significantly short of recognizing students’ rights. Problems are located in relation to language acquisition, social integration, finances, work and personal safety. The article argues that, as well as law and policy, a student security regime should incorporate better university practices and more integrated civil society networks and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and intergovernmental organization (IGO) coverage

Loneliness and international students : an Australian study

In a study of international student security, consisting of 200 intensive interviews with students, resident onshore in Australia, it was found that two thirds of the group had experienced problems of loneliness and/or isolation, especially in the early months. According to Weiss, students experience both personal loneliness because of the loss of contact with families and social loneliness because of the loss of networks. Both forms of loneliness are at times exacerbated by their experiences in institutional sites.The article discusses the coping mechanisms that students use. It identifies a third kind of loneliness experienced by international students, cultural loneliness, triggered by the absence of the preferred cultural and/or linguistic environment. This can affect even students with adequate personal and social support. Thus, same-culture networks are often crucial for international students. Yet same-culture networks are not a universal panacea: They cannot substitute for adequate pastoral care by universities or ensure satisfactory engagement with local cultures, so some causes of cultural loneliness often remain. The article concludes that the creation of stronger bonds between international and local students in the educational setting, helping international students to remake their own cultural maps on their own terms, is key to a forward move on loneliness