Assignment 2 - Article Review

A) Citation for the article:


i) Title : Online Domains of Language Use: Second Language Learners’ Experience of Virtual Community and Foreigners.
http://llt.msu.edu/issues/june2011/pasfieldneofitou.pdf


ii) Journal : June 2011, Volume 15, Number 2


iii) Author’s : Sarah Pasfield-Neofitou
Sarah Pasfield-Neofitou is a PhD student at Monash University, with a BA (Hons) in Linguistics and Japanese. She is currently working as assistant coordinator of Japanese under an assistantship program. Her main research interests are computer mediated communication and applied linguistics, after completing her honours thesis on language learners' informal use of bilingual intercultural chat.




B) Summary of the article


In general, this research looked into the effectiveness of computer-mediated-communication (CMC) as a medium of interaction to enhance second language (L2) learners’ communication and interaction skills of the target language. There are many arguments from other researchers in the past research on CMC regarding the usage of CMC in language learning as some of them said that online communication gives an opportunity for the L2 learners to hide their self-identity, appearance and accent and even appear less foreign. The other said online communication can somehow expose the learners to language variation in the form of popular grammar, slang, and regional dialects. In this research, the researcher has interviewed 12 Australian university students of Japanese who in turn invited their Japanese contacts to participate in this research. Overall, data was collected from 30 participants including the Japanese contacts based on the usage of blogs, e-mails, SNSs, online videos, etc. Yet, this research is focused on the social networking sites Mixi and Facebook. Besides, background interviews were also done to get the information of participants’ language and computing histories. There was a follow-up interview as well focusing on the participants’ most recent interaction in order to obtain more detailed information about their language use in context. The researcher analysed the data at the level of the e-turn, a unit analysis proposed by Thorne (1999). The researcher had divided the findings into four categories. As the researcher focused on the usage of Mixi and Facebook, the findings for the first category which is, Second Language Use According to Linguistic Domain showed that English, or a Mostly English variety was used on Facebook in their communication while Japanese or a Mostly Japanese variety was used on Mixi. The second category, Language Choice According to Domain showed that Mixi was identified as a Japanese domain while Facebook was conversely viewed as an English domain whereby Mixi was said as a “Japanese version of Facebook”. The third category, Interlocutors According to Domain showed that participants’ perception toward Mixi and Facebook based on its’ domain as well as demographic makeup somehow contribute to a greater influence on participants’ language choice. Last but not least, The Benefits of Virtual Community and Language Immersion showed that virtual community somehow provides a large variety of languages whereby people are surrounded by the language. Based on the data, the immersion-like effect of being surrounded by one’s target language the Australian participants to read and write more using their L2. As virtual community used by anonymous users, Levy and Stockwell (2006) stated that while anonymity in CMC can have positive effects such as giving L2 speakers more confidence to participate than they may have in face-to-face communication. Therefore, it can be said that networks or domains are influenced and continuously sustained by the social interaction of individual. In overall, CMC somehow has being one of the effective ways for the L2 learners in order to learn their target language.




C) Review


Honestly, when the first time I read the title of the research, I had no idea at all what was the title all about. After reading through the introduction, the research has taken my interest to finish up reading it and share my review on it. I think this research was well-conducted because as we can see from the researcher’s biographies, she is expert in technology and language specifically Japanese. Besides, the researcher is aware with current social networking system like Facebook. Facebook has become one of the most preferable medium of communication between people all around the world. Therefore, the users are surrounded with so many kinds of foreign languages and it somehow helps the users to learn something new and provide reinforcement to the users to learn new languages as their second or third language if they have virtual friends with different languages in this cyberspace. According to TeachingEnglish, British Council (2009), 69% of learners around the world said that they learned most effectively when socialising informally.


In relation to the Malaysian contexts, from my point of view I think social networking has been a very famous medium of interaction among the students. I believe most of the students in school have their own social network account such as Facebook, Tweeter and many more. It is accessible as they can login to their account anytime and anywhere by just using mobile phone nowadays. In terms of the teaching and learning of ESL, I personally think that it is one of the preferable ways for the students to learn the language yet, need to be monitored by the teachers or parents. For example, things like Facebook group, teachers can suggest to the students to join certain group which is beneficial for them in learning the language as the group may bring together students from all over the country to get a group mind view on some of the information or topic they come across. Besides that, we can see nowadays most of the youngsters (students) especially prefer to use English as a medium of communication in social network. They either copy and paste the quotes from the internet or they try to built sentences on their own, expressing their feelings or thoughts. Perhaps social networking does not really help in improving the students’ writing skill because as we all know, most of them use the SMSs’ language and short forms which sometimes create a confusion to the readers yet it helps in improving the students’ communication skill as well as their social skill. Therefore, in my opinion, social network can be considered as an informal way of teaching and learning the language. :)