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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 319

Part of Session 134: Multilingual written internet data in language contact studies (Other abstracts in this session)

Code-switching in a language learning blogging community

Authors: Bündgens-Kosten, Judith
Submitted by: Bündgens-Kosten, Judith (Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany)

This study looks at code-switching and related phenomena at a language learning blogging community, lang-8.

Language learning communities online combine features of the traditional language learning classroom and of computer-mediated communication. Their explicit emphasis on language learning, often as their primary communicative purpose, is reminiscent of classroom settings, while they are also influenced by their specific technological makeup and the affordances this provides and by the association with pre-existing online genres, such as the diary-style blog (“journal”).

This paper focuses on blog posts with the L2 English. According to Mizumoto et al 2011, lang-8 has more than 200,000 users, 142,311 of which are learning English, the most frequently studied language on lang-8 (Mizumoto et al. 2011, 148). Data basis is a collection of 116 blog posts with English as a target language, written by 115 users speaking 15 different L1s, posted on two different dates. 31.9% of blog posts in this corpus show evidence of code-switching or related phenomena. This data is analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative measures. The paper will address:

• Types of code-switching and translation work observed.

• The effect of the specific communicative setting, especially assumptions about the audience of ones blogposts, on language choice, as well as

• Effects of native language/country of origin, age and gender on code-switching behavior.

The analysis will not only look at what happens, but also what does not happen, looking both at code-switching avoidance and at types of code-switching conspicuously absent.

This analysis will not only help understand how code-switching operates in this environment, but will also hint at how learners conceptualize the specific communicative situation here, i.e. how they understand language learning communities to function and which role in their learning process they attribute to their audience.

References

Mizumoto, Tomoya, Komachi, Mamoru, Nagata, Masaaki, and Matsumoto, Yuji: Mining Revision Log of Language Learning SNS for Automated Japanese Error Correction of Second Language Learners , Proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing , AFNLP, 147–155, 2011