This dissertation explores the incorporation of Facebook into everyday live activities and practices of a group of young Turkish-American women affiliated with a faith-based movement, known as the Hizmet (volunteer's service) movement. In particular, I examine the emergent communicative practices and performances of these young women and how they create a sense of identity and community and mediate these via this online medium in their diverse geographical localities. I start my analysis by investigating several instances of discourse and within these I focus on metacommunicative, metapragmatic, and metadiscursive acts in aiming to understand their semiotic performances on and off Facebook. I found that these young Turkish-American women, after being dispersed to different geographical localities, began to see Facebook as a vital means to maintain their group ties. Furthermore, their use of Facebook from 2008 to 2011 became more and more for Hizmet purposes. Stepping into the ideological realm, I understand that the notion of "friendship" is highly influenced by a semiotic ideology of tefani (gloss). That is, true/religious brotherhood is one of the important principles of gaining ikhlas (sincerity) and hence a way to establish good relations with God, and these young women see Facebook as a means to further their relationship with their sisters and thus establish a good relationship with God. I observed that they rely heavily on their unique ways of speaking to mark their in-groupness. I argue that, in the absence of several resources exploited by mainstream youths in the US, these young women employ and exploit their ingroup language features as a means to construct their "coolness" and "otherness". In addition, through playing with several languages and language varieties and playing with several generated intertexts, these young women make their interactions somewhat invisible to outsiders through drawing from their shared stock of knowledge and communicative repertoires developed in prior in. Influenced by several competing ideologies, these young women negotiated the use and incorporation of Facebook into their everyday life and especially its pros and cons in terms of their religiosity. Through differentiating their Facebook use from its popular uses, they transform it to a Vefabook (Loyaltybook) and hence employ it as a medium of/for vefa (loyalty) through which they practice uhuvvet (religious brotherhood) and tefani. Their unique ways of speaking and circulation of stretches of discourse contribute to transforming Facebook into a vefa space where they mainly interact with their sisters in their group.

The thesis works with the fact that communication on social network sites, particularly on Twitter, occurs in short text messages, tweets, which are restricted to the maximum of 140 characters. This leads to the tendency to shorten single and multiword expressions in order to save space and increase the content of sent information. The thesis examines the hypothesis that the number of shortenings on Twitter and their variation may function as a stylistic indicator of tweet genre. It is expected (i) that the number of shortenings in the Twitter sample will be higher compared to other genres and (ii) that the sample will contain more types of shortening, some of which will be characteristic for the tweet genre in general in comparison with the control sample. The research sample of 200 shortenings was collected from two Twitter trends, #Grenfell Tower and #Wimbledon. In the analysis part, the collected sample of shortenings is examined quantitatively, compared to the control sample and separately, interpreted qualitatively. The Appendix contains the complete table listing the meanings of all shortenings. Key words: Twitter, shortening, stylistics, internet linguistics, language of social media

The aim of this master thesis entitled Social Media and teaching and learning French as a foreign language is to find the elements which connect teaching and learning French as a foreign language and social media. The theoretical part is based on the definitions of foreign language didactics and teaching French as a foreign language. It describes in detail the current approaches in teaching foreign languages and competencies suggested by the Common European Framework of Reference for languages and Framework Education Programme of the Czech Republic. Then, social media are introduced theoretically. The theoretical introduction is followed by the presentation of concrete social networks and the statistics of their use. The next chapter is dedicated to communication which unifies these so far separated fields of the diploma thesis. Finally, the thesis summarizes the potential and the dangers of social media for teaching and learning French. The practical part focuses on the analysis of selected French coursebooks and enumerates the examples of online communication and social media in these teaching resources. Then, a list of educational profiles on social media is presented. This is accompanied by profiles that are not educational at first, but their content can be used for teaching and learning...