COMPUTER APPLICATION

SECOND ASSIGNMENT

GROUP MEMBERS: SARAH KHAIRUDDIN 0713976

ESLAM ABDURABUH AHMED 0614532

NURUL DIANA MD. RABI 0634264

NORAINI MOHD NOOR 0728928

COURSE CODE: ENGL 4740

SECTION : 1

INSTRUCTOR : DR. ROZINA ABDUL GHANI

DUE DATE : 15TH FEBRUARY 2011

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Research Objective

This paper is intended to discover the comparison and similarities

between spoken and written discourse. We also intend to analyzed corpus

from an online public chat room to discover the variation used in written

discourse among the chatters. In the analysis we will be analyzing the

deviation or violation in terms of grammar and discourse markers whether it

block or make the conversation successful.

Methodology

We have selected corpus from of an online public chat room from

www.wireclub.com. The selections of chatters were picked randomly because

they were conversed at the same time at the same chatting room. The

identities of the chatters are unknown because they were using only their

nick names instead of real name. After selecting the corpus, we analyzed it

by looking at different aspect of linguistics items such as grammar and

lexical choices. Later on, at the end of the analysis, we will make a general

decision on whether it is more prone to spoken or written discourse.

Literature Review

The three respective articles that would be reviewed here are “code

switching and code mixing in internet chatting; between ‘yes’, ‘ya’, and ‘si’ a

case study by Monica Stella Cardenas- Claros and Neny Isharyanti”, “A Funky

Language for Teenzz to Use: Representing Gulf Arabic in Instant Messaging

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by David Palfreyman and Muhamed al Khalil”, and “Gender and Turn

Allocation in a Thai Chat Room” by Siriporn Panyametheekul and Susan C.

Herring. These three research articles has its own distinctive components

that it highlights in its findings, however all three has an underlying element

which it focuses its whole research on which is computer mediated

communication. The article by Cardenas and Ishayanti focuses on the topics

that triggers code switching and code mixing in chat rooms and it also

discuss how the traditional distinction between spoken and written language

is blurred in computer mediated communication. As for the second article, by

Palfreyman and Al- Khalil, its research is trying to find as to how do the

instant messaging users represent or perhaps fail to represent Arabic

sounds. The final article used here by Panyametheekul and Herring analyzes

gender in relation to turn allocation in a popular Thai chat room on the World

Wide Web.

The first article by Cardenas and Ishayanti begins with clarifying the

differences between code switching and code mixing itself, as its difference

is still an on- going debate, however the basic definition is an understood

aspect. Its research is merely done on male participants, due to the lack of

female participants present in the undergraduate program. The study is

conducted on the well known software used by students known as MSN

messenger. The 12 selected participants are of Indonesian and Spanish

origin. And the study found that the usage of code mixing and code

switching was more frequent on the Indonesian participants however, the

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switching made by the Spanish students is longer than the Indonesian

students. This research aimed to add to the limited data available about the

Internet chatting practices of advanced users of English from Spanish-

speaking and Indonesian-speaking backgrounds and it certainly did just that.

This study is unique in the sense that no other study has compared the code

alternation phenomena across cultures in synchronous CMC.

The second article by Palfrey and Al- Khalil uses three sources of data:

a corpus of messenger conversations (supplemented by short interviews with

the core informants), responses to a short e-mail survey and informal

observation. This respective research also uses the instant messaging

software to carry the research and the participants consist of three female

students, university students and age of 18-19. The messenger programs

used by students all include a feature for archiving or saving conversations,

and students were asked to obtain consent, where feasible, from their

interlocutor to save the conversation and use it anonymously for research.

The findings that are obtained from the research conducted are that the

conversations in this corpus share some features with English CMC studied

by earlier researchers. Concerning the use of Arabic vis-à-vis English, in

common with Warschauer et al.'s (2002) findings, in the present corpus there

was a fair amount of code-switching (changing mid-utterance or mid-

sentence from one language to another) and code-mixing (using words or

phrases from one language within sentences in the other language).

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As for the final article, by Panyametheekul and Herring; the research

where gender is taken into account for the research purpose, used a well

known Thai chat room whereby discussion is varied from one category to

another. Most of the participants are living in Thailand, and between the

ages of 11 and 25. The researcher says that “Thai chat is especially

amenable to the study of gender in that the Thai language has sentence-final

particles that can be used to classify whether participants are female or

male; that is, gender is grammatically visible”. There are three strategies

which are used to define the results of the study done. Strategy A is the

current speaker selects the next speaker; strategy B is simply speaking up

without consideration for ongoing conversations and C is a continuation of an

unsuccessful initiation, and shows the effects of persistence more than

successful initiation. So the finding of the study are spreaded widely

however, in this review the gender significance is focused so highlighting the

result concerning gender issues is prior to other just as significance results.

The study found that Females use A more than males, and males use B and

C more than females. It was noted by the researchers that noted above that

A is the strategy that most directly mimics face-to-face conversation. Their

finding is thus consistent with previous research that finds females to be

more interactive and other-oriented than males (Coates, 1993; Edelsky,

1981; Gilligan, 1982; Herring, 1996).

Having reviewed through these articles, it is can be seen that CMC is

the center of many researches done and being carried out in the

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contemporary time. It has a significant effect on language learning as one

can clearly see in many researches that have done.

The analysis

The main difference between spoken and written language is that most written

language is intended to be read by someone who is away from the writer. Therefore to have a

successful conversation, it has to be a lot more clear than spoken language used in a face to face

conversation, because the reader cannot ask questions to the writer at the exact moment.

Although some written genres such as texts and e-mails are very similar to spoken language, in

general written language is more solid (more content words in a smaller space) uses more

subordinate clauses and has less redundancy (words like ''sort of'', ''like'', ''you know'', ''yeah?''

Based on the chat room corpus we have found, the words they used in the chat room was

the written form of the spoken language. The chat room is called the lounge where everyone is

free to talk about what they want. Based on our observation, the words they used were much

more ‘relax’ and as if they are speaking to each other therefore the words are simple and easy as

in any other conversations they have in real life. Some of the spelling is very précised and

correct, but sometimes the chatters also use short forms, for some of the words.

For example :

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As we can see here, the chatter used correct form of grammar as in written language but

the next chatters used some words like ‘pics’ ( pictures), ‘lol’ (laugh out loud) for the text.

Throughout the conversation, the chatters are getting to know with one another. They also were

discussing about one particular issue that is regarding learning other languages. There were many

violations in terms of rules of grammar for example in terms of spelling, lack of punctuation

marks, upper case for proper nouns such as name of place and markers.

For example:

The example above shows that the chatters were omitting sentence markers such as

punctuation mark (‘), question mark, and full stop. Furthermore, the chat room corpus is more

likely to be categorized under spoken language because the conversation is in real time and the

writers (chatters) can ask many questions to other writers as if they are having the conversation

face to face. Some of the conversations were overlapping since they were not taking turn in

doing the conversation. This is normal in spoken discourse where one person is doing the talking

and others might be speaking at the same time.

We can also see that the language used has been simplified in various ways. Although the

form of language applied was written, the style of the language is very similar to the spoken

language. They tend to write without considering the features of written language. For example,

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the use of non-capitalized letter only as they did not capitalized proper noun like Japan and Peru.

They also did not capitalize the initial letter of the sentence like when oldgirl007 typed, “this is

me a old girl need a friend to chat”. These mistakes were illustrated in the corpus below.

The chatters kept repeating the same mistakes throughout the conversation; use only

non-capitalized letter and also did not capitalized the initial letter of the sentence. Other than

that, they also tend to omit pronouns in their sentence. For instance, they wrote “good son”, but

the correct way of writing it is “you are a good son’. In this corpus, we can also see that the use

of verb to be was being neglected as in the phrase like, “your nick name so long”. Here the verb

to be ‘is’ has been omitted. We can also notice in this corpus that the verb ‘to be’ had been

simplified. Instead of writing, “I am going to Thailand on my honeymoon”, the chatter wrote “Im

going to Thailand on my honeymoon”.

Conclusion

Generally, what we can conclude from this research is that in real time conversation,

people tend to ignore the features of written language. This might be because of the time

constraint as they need to give their response immediately as they were speaking. However, this

style of writing does not affect the conversation because as a real time conversation, it does not

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need complex structure of written language. We concluded that the corpus used in an online

public chat room is inclined to be spoken discourse although it is written because the style of

writings were quite similar as if they were conversed face-to-face.

Bibliography

Cardenas M.S., & Neny Isharyanti, (2009). Code switching and code mixing in internet chatting: between ‘yes’, ‘ya’, and ‘si’ a case study. Jaltcaljournal vol.5, No.3 pages 67-78.

Palfreyman D., & Muhamed al Khalil, (2003). “A Funky Language for Teenzz to Use”: Representing Gulf Arabic in Instant Messaging. jcmc Vol.9 No.1.

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Siriporn Panyametheekul, & Herring S.C., (2003).Gender and Turn Allocation in a Thai Chat Room. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication

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