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