literacies of bilingual youth: a profile of txt, social, and bilingual literacy
TRANSCRIPT
Literacies of Bilingual Youth: A profile of bilingual txt, social, and academic literacy
Michelle Johnson-McSweeneyLinguistics, The Graduate Center at CUNY
Oxford Internet Institute, July 7, 2015
One Bilingual is NOT Two Monolinguals
Common Underlying Profienciency
Participants
Can digital go plurilingual?
Data Corpus of text messagesRecords from 32 chatting games conducted on gchat (word guessing game)Academic reading tests in English & SpanishAcceptability judgment task of textisms & colloquial expressionsOral conversationsLanguage background & phone use survey
Messages51,000 SMS and WhatsApp messages17 students
Spanish, English & MixedEmojis rendered as codesConversations (2 way consent)1month to 2 years
Features of
Temporal Constraints
RespellingsRespellings (‘an’ for ‘and’ or ‘grax’ for ‘gracias’ (thanks)) Letter substitution (‘wud’ for ‘would’)
Letter omission (‘ello’ for ‘hello’)Letter appellation (‘soooooo’ for ‘so’)Letter transposition (‘hte’ for ‘the’)
Abbreviations
AbbreviationsAbbreviations and intialisms (‘brb’ for ‘be right back’ and ‘ntp’ for ‘no te preocupes’ (don’t worry))128 unique non-standard abbreviations
EmoticonsEmoticons ( :-) )(Dresner & Herring, 2010; Tossell et al., 2012)
Creativity and Playfulness
CreativityCreativity (“manipulating word forms in unexpected yet contextually appropriate ways” (Tagg, 2009, p. 159). For example, “ I think I‘m waiting for the same bus! Inform me when you get there, if you ever get there.NAME14 x” (Tagg, 2009, p. 171).
Part OneMultimodal assessment of academic skills and social skills as predictive of preferred language of texting. (116 students)
Written (ACE)English/Spanish monolingual
Aural (Craig Saffoe)Monolingual English
Oral (Beyonce)Bilingual
Digital (Chatting Game)Bilingual
Part TwoDescriptive Grammar of Young Urban Sp-En Bilingual Texters
Code switching/code fluency ****Abbreviation languageError Analysis (for spoken SLP)Prescriptive GrammarPunctuationGender
Code Switching and Language Mixing
Formal LinguisticsPrevious studies have shown
lexical differences.discourse differences.
How to approach the syntactic differences.Are there measurable syntactic differences?
Statistical ApproachFunction words (of, a, por, x)
Sentence placement, relationship to other words
Word combinations
Speech Language Pathology Clinical Approach
Mean Length of UtteranceRoots + Inflection
T-valueNumber of unique words
Lexical DensityNouns and verbs versus function words
CS as the solution
Where this is going