Thursday, September 4, 2014

Bon voyage



The Grammar Gang editors are going holiday! We'd like to thank all our followers and everyone who has contributed a post over the years.

This is not a final farewell. We hope to be back in the future. In the meantime, though, if you have any questions about English academic writing and grammar please visit Ms Parrot's English for Uni website and the interactive English for Uni blog where you can ask and answer questions to do with English.

Au revoir!

Andrea Duff
Julia Miller
Jyh Wee Sew
Lisa Emerson
Helen Johnston
Brady Spangenberg
Susanna Carter
Linda Bergmann

Friday, August 1, 2014

A review of the book "Web 2.0 for schools"

Julia Davies and Guy Merchant, Web 2.0 for schools: Learning and social participation, New York: Peter Lang, 2009, pp. xi + 146. ISBN 9781433102639

In this book, Davies and Merchant (D & M) explain that a significant amount of learning occurs in  out-of-school contexts, leaving the concept of formal learning institutions outdated. Understanding online interaction as a new way of learning helps us to appreciate the various online interactions found in Web 2.0. A paradigm shift in learning practice is engendered by digital technology, and in particular networking, participative and collaborative developments are maintained constantly in Web 2.0 (Sew, 2010).
D & M identify an advantage of web-based learning, namely that Web 2.0 spaces give voice to participants and suggest new possibilities for social engagement and citizenship (p. 8). Indeed, there is much efficacy to be harnessed from Web 2.0 including the learning of Malay as a foreign language (Sew, 2009, 2012). As a space to cultivate personal interests, the fan sites powered by Web 2.0 have become the avenue to develop self-esteem for a male Chinese American immigrant. In dealing with his literacy fallout in the formal classroom setting, the teenager was able to find his (English) voice through interacting with the fans of his website created in dedication to Ryoko, a celebrated female singer of Japanese pop songs (Lam, 2000).
D & M's project investigates the impact of digital media on two areas: firstly, changes in holistic individual identities that occurred with the use of digital media; and secondly, the extent to which digital media have altered conventional social organizing criteria, such as gender, ethnicity and language (p. 17). The answers are found in the deliberations and vignettes in each chapter. At the outset, the holistic social identities of online users may be fragmented by digital technology (Asthana, 2012).  Some of the web-based features may include user presence, the ability to modify content and user-generated content, and the social participation of online users (p. 5). As a result, the self becomes a fluid concept in online activities. Debunking a unitary concept of self(less) in an interface of real and virtual worlds, Thorne’s observation (2003) that artifacts, including digital media, take their character from the activity itself is insightful to us for contextualizing the notion of pattern-randomness. The notion of pattern-randomness involving distributed identity-self generated by hybrid chase games such as Can You See Me Now? illustrates a shift of embodied-self to a digital production of a telematic posthuman self (cf. Chatzichristodoulou, 2009).
In contrast to the term affinity spaces introduced in Gee and Hayes’ book (2011), D & M use the term spaces of reflection. Among other reasons, participation in these spaces is not absolutely collaborative, as opposition is a common outcome from interacting with others online (p. 18). However, the term reflection has a didactic underpinning that may not correlate with the motive(s) of participation among like-minded online gamers or chat room users online.
Despite the terminology quibble, affinity spaces as a term appears frequently in Chapter 4 describing the intricacies of online photo sharing. While acknowledging the use of webcams and internet-based video conferencing, D & M contend that most online interactions come in written formats that are stripped of the prosodic and paralinguistic features of oral and face-to-face communication (p. 19). Such a view is contestable with literacy outcomes manifested in different modes of semiotic expression following the application of a multimodal approach to second language writing (Nelson, 2006). Additionally, online bilingual English-Cantonese-chat interaction is multimodal with its digital content inherent in different forms of emoticon and animation (Lam, 2004).
Technical terms such as folksonomy and tag cloud are introduced to highlight the varying aggregation of tags and tag clusters assigned to the respective visual content stored in Flickr. Some of the interesting themes useful for pedagogical purposes reflected in Flickr’s membership groups include 5 picture story and photo dominoes (pp. 48-49). The former photo group requires individuals to upload five images that tell a story, while the members of the latter have to contribute an image that is relatable to the previous photo in either content or theme. Diverse uses of photo sharing in Flickr may foster creativity with new interests. Davies develops an interest for street-art from studying the online photos in Flickr while Merchant enhances his understanding of different types of padlock following his participation in a Flickr micro-community (pp. 43-44).
D & M find the data collected by Technocrati’s blog-count in Web 2.0 rather bare because the number says little about whose blogs are being commented or visited regularly; nor do the statistics reveal who owns multiple blogs (p. 27). D & M’s reporting on 2 billion images found in Flickr until Nov. 2007 (p. 35), however, does not tell much about the types of picture that are more frequently uploaded, or the categories of image that attracted more online viewers with extensive comments. It is explicated further that music sharing is an extremely popular online practice among 15-25 year olds.
In relation to the disregard of copyright laws by online users of music sharing sites, e.g., Napster, BitTorrent and LimeWire (p. 73-72), D & M make a timely suggestion for media education to include legality issues surrounding music sharing. Beyond verbal warnings against downloading music files illegally, educating young learners on the musical materials that are available for free sharing and selecting intellectual properties endorsing maximal Creative Commons are instrumental to responsible digital citizenry. Teaching responsible digital social media in schools is critical to bridge the ethical vacuum in current digital media use. D & M stress that the dynamic features of shared knowledge and distributed authorship qualify wikis as a valuable learning tool. The characteristics of wikis outlined in the book indicate that open wiki participation is conducive to intense interactivity online (p. 99), so encouraging learning involvement online entails a change of teachers’ role from transmitting knowledge to coordinating and facilitating learner participation. In this respect, teachers are considered as the brokers of learning in the learning landscape of the 21st century.
Using wiki-writing as an example, D & M outline the principles of 4P as the structured conditions to implement online learning practice (p. 106). Furthermore, appreciating the underlying operatives that include purpose, participation, partnerships and planning are critical to prevent a recycling of traditional learning with digital technology. An old wine in new bottles phenomenon occurs when digital media are used to maintain traditional learning practices, namely essayist literacy (see Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). At the cognitive level, we are reminded that pigeonholing ICT skills according to the requirements of different subjects is not in sync with learning in the digital age (Buckingham, 2007)
An alternative would be playing literacy games involving both children and parents towards transformative learning. Through structured repetition and feedback programmed digitally, literacy games are relevant for improving English reading skills in the United Kingdom (Homes, 2011). In line with the possible strength of digital media to foster learning, a different picture complementary to the current practice of teacher-centred chalk and talk is presented in the book. D & M introduce the readers to many digital platforms available for constructive exploitations in formal learning.
Peppered with interesting anecdotes, the strengths and the shortcomings surrounding each type of digital media are examined in the book. The theoretical grounding and hands-on skills provided by the authors have positioned digital media strategically for classroom learning. Useful information is made available for educators and parents to appreciate the significance of various digital literacy practices in out-of-classroom contexts. Readers may find the idea of brokering learning to maintain learners’ participation online at all levels of education an important strategy for progressive learning. In the current learning landscape, infusing digital technology into pedagogy is indeed a relevant literacy practice.

References
Asthana, S. (2012). Youth media imaginaries from around the world. New York: Peter Lang.
Buckingham, D. (2007). Beyond technology: Children’s learning in the age of digital culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Chatzichristodoulou, M. (2009). When presence-absence becomes pattern-randomness: Blast theory’s can you see me now? In A. Bentkowska-Kafel, T. Cashen, & H. Gardiner (eds.), Digital visual culture: Theory and practice (pp. 79-87). Bristol, UK: Intellect Books.

Gee, J. P., & Hayes, E. R. (2011). Language and learning in the digital age. London: Routledge.
Holmes, W. (2011). Using game-based learning to support struggling readers at home. Learning, Media and Technology, 36(1), 5-19.

Lam, E. W. S. (2000).  L2 literacy and the design of the self: A case study of a teenager writing on the Internet.  TESOL Quarterly 34(4), 457-482.


Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2006). New literacies: Everyday practices and classroom learning.  Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Nelson, M. E.  (2006). Mode, meaning and synaesthesia in multimedia L2 writing. Language Learning & Technology 10, 56-76. http://llt.msu.edu/vol10num2/nelson/default.html  

Sew, J.W. (2012). Learning Malay online at tertiary level. GEMA: Online Journal of Language Studies 12(1), 147-162. http://www.ukm.my/ppbl/Gema/GEMA%20vol%2012%20(1)%202012/pp_147_162.pdf

Sew, J.W. (2010). Persembahan@Media.com. Kuala Lumpur: University Malaya Press.

Sew, J.W.  (2009). Wired new learning: Blogging Malay literacy. Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, 6, Suppl. 1, pp. 302–314. http://e-flt.nus.edu.sg/v6sp12009/sew.pdf
Thorne, S. L. (2003). Artifacts and cultures-of-use in intercultural communication.  Language Learning & Technology, 7, 38-67. http://llt.msu.edu/vol7num2/thorne/default.html


Jyh Wee Sew
Centre for Language Studies
Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
National University of Singapore

Sunday, June 29, 2014

An Australian Cultural Dictionary

A koala at a wildlife park near Adelaide, Australia

Where do you turn to in order to understand unfamiliar words and expressions when you’re living and studying in a new culture? My first point of call is usually a dictionary. Not all dictionaries contain local expressions, however. That’s why we’ve come up with an Australian Cultural Dictionary containing words and expressions suggested by English language students in Adelaide, Australia. All these words and expressions are ones that the students found hard to understand in their first weeks in Australia.

This dictionary is free, it’s online, and it’s designed specifically for learners of English. That means that we’ve included information that learners really need:

A kangaroo with a joey in its pouch

  • spelling;
  • definitions, written with a limited defining vocabulary (i.e. a set number of words used in the definitions so they are simpler to understand);
  • pronunciation, both in the International Phonetic Alphabet and in audio files (which work fine on Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome and will soon work well on Internet Explorer too, we hope);
  • grammatical information, giving information on whether a noun is countable for example, or how to make it plural;
  • usage notes, so that learners know who usually uses a word (for example, older or younger people) and when they might use it (formally or informally);
  • example sentences taken from a corpus (i.e. a collection) of real English sentences;
  • photographs of all the words or of situations in which the expressions are used; and
  • videos of some words and expressions (there is nothing like seeing a kangaroo hopping to understand how it really moves!).
There is also a link to an online survey, and we really hope you’ll give us some feedback (and maybe win a $20 Amazon voucher).

The words and expressions are all used in Adelaide, and most of them are used throughout Australia. Even if you don’t visit our country, we hope the dictionary will give you an idea of some of the common words and expressions you might encounter here.You can find the dictionary at this website: http://www.culturaldictionary.org/

 



























Alpacas at the Royal Adelaide Show

Acknowledgements
This dictionary was produced by Julia Miller, Deny Kwary and Ardian Setiawan. We'd like to thank the School of Education at the University of Adelaide for giving us some funds to help put the project online. We'd also like to thank the PEP students at the university's English Language Centre for suggesting the words and giving us feedback on the types of definitions that worked best. Thank you also to Adam Kilgarriff for allowing us to access the VOLE corpus. And a big thank you to Athena Kerley and Alex Lovat at the University of Adelaide for lending us their voices for the audio files!

Saturday, May 24, 2014

Primary learning in a multilingual society

Eunice Lee is a seven-year old girl who is studying in primary one. She is enrolled in a private school, which requires her traveling for two hours each morning to the so-called better school. On the eve of Labour Day, she returned to her grandparents' house with exercises from school in three languages. Eunice has to learn Malay, English and Mandarin in school. Her favorite language is English and she dislikes Mandarin, her school-based mother tongue. Right after lunch at 3 o’clock one afternoon Eunice started to complete her homework. The problem-solving strategy that required her selecting and creating answers for the blanks was invoked. This strategy was chosen with the awareness that she hated the Spartan learning style, which made her cry before when she was attending kindergarten. It was the least stressful method in solving linguistic problems for her without sacrificing learning too much.

                                 Eunice doing her mother tongue homework at her workstation

Malay was the first exercise type that Eunice did. She was asked to spell and read the words including the instructions. Whenever she was stranded at a syllable, spelling aid was rendered and she continued with the pronunciation before figuring out what to do with the questions. Her tasks included selecting the right color terms for different objects, such as grapes (anggur), hibiscus (bunga raya), grass (rumput), etc., naming objects by pairing the words with images, and serializing pictures in a flow of before-and-after sequence. The tasks were relatively manageable for Eunice; however, the reading of instructions and words via syllabic segmentation was rather challenging. She had to figure out that [i] is a suffix in /mempunyai/ (owns), which is a four-syllabic word /mem-pun-ya-i/ rather than three */mem-pun-yai/.

In comparison to Malay, English was relatively easy for Eunice who had to decide which picture should be matched with /thank you/ in a relationship chain. The person who received a gift or assistance would require the politeness tag as the corresponding utterance. In another Malay exercise, Eunice had to construct sentences for a pictorial sequence, namely one with a girl smiling at a birthday cake and the other showing the girl thanking her mother for a present. This exercise was trying for Eunice as she needed help in Mandarin to clarify matters and draw upon her personal experience from celebrating her sister’s birthday. The language of metacommunication for completing school work oscillated between Mandarin and English in a complicated way. Mandarin was used to encourage her thinking about Jessie, her sister, and the things related to Jessie's birthday celebration. Yet, English was required to fix the syntactic and spelling errors.

                                                      Jessie and Eunice at Legoland

Interestingly, English became the means of explanation in approaching the Malay exercise and English plus Mandarin were the language mediums for talking about the English exercise. The metacommunication of homework solving was a combination of English and Mandarin plus some onomatopoeia for making academic tasks more aligned to a primary school pupil’s mind. Not a single phrase at the metacommunication level was sanitized according to the standard written format in a particular language. This was obvious at the syntactic level as each phrasal segment contained a smattering of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and sounds conjoined within a code-mixing mould involving two of the three languages that Eunice learns. 
Mandarin, a tricky subject for Eunice, was the last exercise type to complete. Eunice, who dislikes Mandarin, has to deal with Mandarin school work that contained very many characters testing one's linguistic-visual spatial memory. The hardest exercise already had the answer choices marked with the number of the questions. Eunice informed that the teacher dropped hints for them, reinforcing negatively the pupil's belief that Mandarin was indeed difficult. The hints that resolved 15% of  the work have made learning Mandarin more opaque. For the remaining Chinese exercises, Eunice had to match pictures with phrases, fill in the blanks with phrases, copy Mandarin characters in a series of writing transformation beginning from the basic strokes to a radical formation before the complete emergence of the Mandarin character; and she had to place punctuation marks, namely a question mark, a comma, or a period in the correct places within or at the end of several Mandarin phrases.

In the learning interactivity, Mandarin was used to talk about the Chinese exercises, as it is the common language between Eunice and her maternal grandparents and parents (her biological mother tongue is Hokkien, spoken in her paternal household). Speaking Mandarin is very different from learning the written Chinese characters and understanding the syntactic constructions. A very young Chinese speaker such as Eunice, who may be fluent in spoken Mandarin, was unable to identify all the corresponding written Mandarin characters in complex phrases. Eunice also had difficulties in construing and producing syntactic segments according to a common Chinese scheme of knowledge, especially when she was already getting used to the logics of English scripts constructed for children in programs like Hi-5, Disney Junior, Okto Channel. 

                                Eunice and her cousin, Jiayi, undoing their mother tongue on stage in their glocal world

One may be interested to know that (Chinese) adults who sing the Mandarin pop songs of Jay Chou and Wang LeeHom may not recognize each Mandarin characters in the lyrics. A cognition with sound symbolic mapping capability and tone-sensitive filter would be sufficient for the musical rendition (cf. Sew 2014a on Mandarin /chun/ or spring being construed as leftover in Hokkien by means of sound symbolism).  The same principle applies when one sings in Hokkien, a southern Chinese dialect, because the target verbal Hokkien words are matched with the corresponding sound symbolic Mandarin characters since there is only one set of Chinese character for all the Chinese dialects.

Mandarin, Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese do not share the same tones. For example, /sui/, or pretty in Hokkien is represented with 水, or water in written Mandarin on the Kara-oke screen. Although the tone of the Hokkien-/sui/ is different from 水, a 'polyglotal' Chinese may easily sort out the dialectal mapping almost instantaneously. Most of the time, however, the dialectal-phonetic-tonal pairing is irrelevant because only singing  and performing matter in the verbal repertoire for singing out loud.

The metacommunication of learning interaction in a multilingual society is a form of complex primary speech much more complicated than the monolingual prints on the exercise sheets (see MacCorquodale, 1970, p. 95 for a explanation on primary speech). In fact, the mode of metacommunication reflects the contemporary language use in a global world that involves a mixing of language codes (Hall & Cook, 2012). The complex dialogue structures in the English conversation between a female representative of an international organization with a prominent local figure in a Guyama community is a good example (Bartlett, 2014, p. 23).

Despite the romantic belief that language learning occurs in the guise of the formal language, spoken utterances on the fly either in a formal, or informal (learning) interactivity do not adhere to the standard variety at morphological and syntactic levels. This is due to the fact that other non-linguisitic indexes are required to complete communication tasks (Sew, 2009, Clark, 1996). One may want to ponder further if dropping out of the primary school has anything to do with the code of metacommunication. The code of instruction that is very different from the code of interaction at home might pose a learning hurdle to a child in acquiring academic knowledge in monolingual and multilingual societies. The notions of elaborated and restricted codes are relevant to understanding the matter (Bernstein, 1964) although this article does not correlate social class with the codes.

Many a times at secondary school level, educators are reminded to speak the language of teenagers in order to connect with the youngsters and secure their attention. Symbolic as it may seem, language as social capital  is another factor underpinning   language learning (Sew, 2012). The use of slang, for example, is a case in point. Slang is something frowned upon as a bad linguistic behavior despite its familiarity in the spoken and digital discourse of youngsters (see Sew, 2014b for a natural occurence of slang in a language learning situation).
Eunice did not cry after three and a half hours of homework coaching on Wednesday, although her eyes began to swell in tears when she was asked to take out the Mandarin work sheets the next day for reading practice. The reading practice was intended as a means to strengthen her linguistic-visual spatial memory for Mandarin. She did not do it, of course. The domestic helper came to her rescue by switching on the DVD player showing Walt Disney’s top computer-animated musical fantasy-comedy film, Frozen. Yes, I let it go by asking Eunice to play the song ‘Let it go’ sung by Idina Menzel again.


References
Bartlett, T. (2014). Analysing power In language: A practical guide. London: Routledge.
Bernstein, B. (1964). Elaborated and restricted codes: Their social origins and some consequences. American Anthropologist 66(6), Part 2, 55–69.

Clark, H. H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hall, G., & Cook, G. (2012). Own-language use in language teaching and learning. Language Teaching 45(3), 271-308.

MacCorquodale, K. (1970). On Chomsky's review of Skinner's 'Verbal Behavior'. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 13(1), 83–99.
Sew, Jyh Wee. (2009). Semiotik Persembahan Wacana [Semiotics of discourse performing]. Kuala Lumpur: University Malaya Press.

____________. (2012). Malay and global literacy. Akademika 82(2), 25-35. http://journalarticle.ukm.my/6118/1/Akademika_82(2)Chap_3-locked.pdf

____________. (2014a). Spring in other dialect. Grammar Gang (January issue).
http://thegrammargang.blogspot.sg/2014/01/spring-in-other-dialect.html

____________. (2014b). Slang: Beyond a knee-jerk reaction. Grammar Gang (April Issue). http://thegrammargang.blogspot.sg/2014/04/slang-beyond-knee-jerk-reaction.html
Jyh Wee Sew
Centre for Language Studies, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, National University of Singapore


Thursday, May 1, 2014

Spot the mistake!

Subject verb disagreements like this are becoming increasingly common in English. It's as though the writer or speaker looks at the last noun they've used and makes the verb agree with that, instead of searching for the subject of the sentence. In this case, it is the "illuminated red beam on the doors" that should change to green, not the doors themselves, so the sentence should read: 

Please do not enter lift cart until the illuminated red beam on the doors changes to green.

Am I being unnecessarily pedantic? I don't think so. The UK Guardian newspaper recently published an article about the Idler Academy's  Bad Grammar Awards. Stray  apostrophes feature there, as well as confusing subjects/objects and inaccurate spelling.

Do these things really matter, though? Surely communication is the main thing? After all, language is all about communication. Yes and no. Spelling mistakes may not matter in the long run, but if communication is impeded by bad grammar or punctuation then there may be serious problems. Think about these sentences from the Cybertext Newsletter blog:

     Most of the time travellers worry about their luggage.

     Most of the time, travellers worry about their luggage.

Are we talking about ordinary travellers or time travellers?

One of my other favourites is this Australian sign:

                                                                 www.australiantimes.co.uk

Without the punctuation, this could mean that drivers should go more slowly because children could be injured if a car hit them. However it can also mean that children should walk more slowly and not bounce along the road!

Finally, let's look at another sign:

The top line starts, "You would of noticed . . ." When we speak in English we usually say "would've". The writer here obviously didn't realise this sound meant "would have" and not "would of".

Little mistakes like this don't matter in terms of communication, but they make the reader think that the writer is either careless or uneducated, and that is not helpful if someone is trying to sell a product, impress a future employer or write a good academic essay.

What common mistakes have you noticed around you, and have your own writing mistakes ever had a comic or serious effect in your life?







Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Slang: Beyond a knee-jerk reaction

Here is a snippet of what was going on in a Malay language classroom. At the beginning of one particular tutorial discussion, the compound word air [water] mata [eye], or tears in the lyrics of a Malay song, entitled Sahabat (Friend, performed by Najwa Latif and featuring Sleet and Shamkamarul) was highlighted for discussion.

Before the lesson could proceed to the next Malay compound selected for discussion, one female student raised a question, “Isn’t air mata boyfriend?”  This knee-jerk reaction in foreign language learning indicated that Malay learners at tertiary level may also be interested in the slangy meanings, i.e. boyfriend or girlfriend beyond the dictionary meaning of air mata. In terms of language pedagogy, the learning diversion was an exciting topic to some male students who began to show a heightened interest in the morpheme.

The learning episode makes an interesting discussion of slang words in this blog post, not least because many young people incorporate slang in verbal communication when they make reference to a romantic partner. Actually, mata air, the inverse of air mata (tears) is the slang for romantic partner in Malay, which may imply that a boyfriend, or girlfriend has the potential to provoke tears.

                                        Mata air (image taken from http://travellermeds.blogspot.sg/2013/08/pemandian-air-panas-mengeruda-soa-ngada.html

In Standard Malay, the word mata air has a dictionary meaning which is spring, or water source. Reflecting further on the meaning in mata air may suggest that the reason for tears to be co-opted into the slang has to do with (erratic) emotional reactions that may come with maintaining a relationship. 


Turning to English, the slang for the same reference is associated with a popular word often uttered in American movies and television programs, namely chicks. From a second speaker viewpoint, the slang chicks may well be referring to small and cuddly qualities, reflecting further a functional aspect of the relationship in the particular speech culture. I welcome alternative explanations as the slangy meanings of chicks in American English. 
                                       Image taken from http://www.jackasscritics.com/movie.php?movie_key=557
Interestingly, the slangy chick has established itself as a force to be reckoned with in literature studies. Reflecting a particular literary genre, the term chick-lit is coined for writings about women of all ages. It is an indisputable fact that chick-lit has received considerable amount of media and academic attention across the globe (cf. Donadio, 2006). Among others, Indigeneous Australian writer, Anita Heiss' work, Not Meeting Mr Right and Avoiding Mr Right are regarded as significant works of chick-lit (Ommundsen, 2011).

During my undergraduate years, my peers co-opted the Cantonese word vegetable [choy] as the slang word for a potential boyfriend or girlfriend. Due to the multiple uses of this slang in Hong Kong drama and movies, the Cantonese morpheme remains a robust slang currently cutting across different types of speech situations. The slangy use of vegetable as romantic partner is also true among young speakers of Southeast Asian Mandarin.

Recently, vegetable or 菜 cài has become a slang word in Taiwanese Mandarin. The Mandarin 'vegetable' was used as slang in the interview between a host and a famous Taiwanese actress on television, as she replied to the local host, “You are not my vegetable” [ni bu shi wo de cài...] to reject the tongue in cheek offer from the male host as her boyfriend. 

Along the green vein, so to speak, many fruit names such as apple, banana, cucumber, and grapes are part of the descriptions for referring to certain human characteristics in English (Sew, 2014). The derivation of human references based on vegetables and fruits may have started as slangy references before the full acceptance and common use of the meanings in verbal communication.
There are several reasons for speakers to include slang as part of their utterances in communication. Peer-group bonding, or aping may be a reason for the use of choy when a young speaker is chatting with his friends casually. Peer-group identification or the desire to connect with her clique underpins my Chinese student's interest in using mata air as slang when she interacts with her Malay friends. One study reports that the use of slang is a self-protecting strategy for interaction in certain Malay speech community (Noriah & Norma, 2006). In this instance, slang becomes a masking tool in face-to-face communication.

In claiming that texting occupies an important position among youngsters, Deborah Tannen has noticed that young people prefer a digital text to a phone call, which is considered to be intrusive (McLaughlin, 2010). As a typical semiotic culture in using social media, inserting slangy lingo in electronic text augurs well with texting as an intimate form of communication for young people. For example, Eva Lam (2004) has studied the digital records of two female chat room users and noticed that certain texts contained hybrid phrases combining English and Cantonese. Lam's digital data such as open laugh mei (are you kidding) and hate 4 nei (hate you forever) are slangy digital exchanges. 

Ontologically speaking, our mind may be more poetic and capable of making hybrid connections to many abstract, or metaphorical notions derived from the original linguistic meanings when we operate digitally. The medium of communication is a relevant factor contributing to slang production because it is easy to text slangy morphemes via a smart phone, or utter slangy references face-to-face than to spell them out in print for mass distribution (Sew, 2010).

The inclusion of an alternative lingo within the electronic discourse runs parallel to the use of slang as a pragmatic diversion in oral communication. It is logical to assume that young netizens' construction of semiotic codings while interacting with each other, as a form of personal texting in the digital spaces, may be the underlining pragmatic reason for online advertisements to include hybrid Chinese expressions and phrases that are different from the standard grammar (Feng & Wu, 2007).

We may equate mata air in Malay with chicks in American English, 菜 or choy in Cantonese, or cài in Taiwanese and Southeast Asian Mandarin as the slangy lingo of young speakers, although chicks is limited to a female reference. (Perhaps, cock may be the English slang word referring to the male counterpart). 
Readers who know any slangy words communicated in the same way as mata air, chicks, or choy are invited to share their collection of slang words, as well as their reasons for making use of the slang words in daily communication.

References
Donadio, R. (2006). The Chick-Lit Pandemic. The New York Times, 19 Mar. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/books/review/19donadio.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Feng, J.W., & Wu, D. (2007). Cultural value change in mainland China's commercial discourse. In Shi-xu (Ed.), Discourse as cultural struggle (pp. 73-90). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Lam, W.S.E. (2004). Second language socialization in a bilingual chat room: Global and local considerations. Language Learning & Technology 8(3), 44-65. http://llt.msu.edu/vol8num3/lam/default.html

McLaughlin, J. (2010). To text or not to text: Even young people don't know the answer. Inside Fordham. http://www.fordham.edu/campus_resources/enewsroom/inside_fordham/december_6_2010/news/to_text_or_not_to_te_77749.asp

Noriah Mohamed, & Norma Baharom. (2006). Pembentukan kata dalam slanga lelaki gender ketiga. In Paitoon Chaiyanara et al. (Ed.), Bahasa: Memeluk akar menyuluh ke langit (pp. 126-171). Singapura: Universiti Teknologi Nanyang.
Ommundsen, W. (2011). Sex in the global city: Chick-lit with a difference. Contemporary Women's Writing 5(2), 107-124.

Sew, J.W. (2010). Persembahan@Media.com. Kuala Lumpur: Universiti Malaya Press.
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Jyh Wee Sew
Centre for Language Studies, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, National University of Singapore

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Games for language teaching and learning


www.speakinglish.com


Following on from Jyh’s post about the play museum, I thought I’d write about how we can use games in language teaching and learning. 



As a language teacher in Portugal in the 1990s, there were lots of games I used with my students. One favourite was the grammar auction, where students had an amount of (imaginary!) money and had to bid for sentences. If the sentence was correct, they doubled their money; if it was ungrammatical, they lost their money. Fortunes were made and lost in the space of a lesson! 

Another favourite activity was picture pairs, where cards represented pairs of words and pictures. For example, a picture of an umbrella was matched by the word ‘umbrella’ on another card. All the cards started off face down, and students could turn over two cards at a time in order to find a perfect pair. These cards could be difficult for the artistically challenged teacher to make, but fortunately there were several good books of grammar games with photocopiable activities. Two very useful  books were Penny Ur’s Grammar Practice Activities and Mario Rinvolucri’s Grammar Games. There were others whose names I’ve forgotten, but perhaps you’d like to share your ideas in the comments box below?
www.gamecarpets.com

Another game was snakes and ladders, in which students threw a dice to go round a board and answer questions on aspects of English grammar. If they answered wrongly when their counter was on the head of a snake, down they went to the snake’s tail a few rows below. However, if they answered correctly at the foot of a ladder, they could go a long way up the board.


We also played dominoes, with words and definitions, or pictures and written words, on different domino rectangles. And of course, we played a lot of bingo, with numbers and words. A
photo by Julia Miller
slightly less lugubrious variation on the word game hangman was the spelling shark, in which students had a limited number of opportunities to guess the letters that made up a word. If they weren’t quick enough, and didn’t guess the word in number of chances available, the stick figure on the whiteboard walked off a cliff and fell into the mouth of a hungry shark.  The number of chances increased if the teacher was feeling generous!


photo by Julia Miller
With very young students, musical colours was a winner. The children danced around to an English song, and when the music stopped they had to stand on a large piece of paper in the colour called out by the teacher. We also did this activity with shapes.


Many games were enjoyed by students of all ages. However, some adult learners and parents of younger students worried that games were not a ‘serious’ learning activity. Their fears were unfounded, as students in my classes were motivated by the games and did well in exams. 

Although, as a teacher, I spent a lot of time preparing materials, these games could be used again and again, and brought a lot of pleasure to my students, while at the same time stimulating them in their language learning. Nowadays, of course, there are so many opportunities for online language games too. What are some of the language learning games and websites that you like best?