The aim of this essay is to determine where on a continuum between speech and writingwritten computer-mediated communication (chat language) would be placed. The essay makes use of a methodology based on Biber (1988). This was done using a quantitative research methodology based on counting and comparing specific linguistic features in different texts. The data for chat language came from the NPS Chat Corpus. Other data used were transcripts of spoken discourse as well as a popular scientific text as material for comparison. This essay is mainly focused on four features: the use of pronouns, passives, ellipsis and the type/token ration of each individual text. Despite the limited size of the material sampled, the results showed that chat language had more in common overall with speech than with writing.

This essay investigates cases of Swedish-English code-switching in a bilingual discussion forum on the Internet. Code-switching is a linguistic term used to describe switches from one language to another in discourse. The material consists of excerpts from the forum which have been analyzed and presents various cases of code-switching which appeared in the forum. The examples from the forum presented in this essay are chosen due to their relevance to code-switching and bilingualism. The examples were analyzed according to Romaine’s (1989) and Klintborg’s (1999) classifications of code-switching. The research questions sought to find out if, how and why the bilingual users in this forum code-switch when communicating. The results proved that the bilingual users do code-switch, and that the most common switch is the insertion of one word, or several words, in another language into an otherwise monolingual sentence. The discussion part also consists of a summary of the switches in the forum. The conclusion of the study is that code-switching does exist in this forum, and the participants code-switch in different ways, however mainly to show hospitality and to signal a belonging to the group.

Abstract This thesis is an interdisciplinary study on how students and teachers as participants in computer-supported language learning make meaning to their activities. The analysis moves gradually from a more general discussion of participant activity and interaction in computer-supported environments to a domain-specific discussion of language learning and work. The main body of data for the study comes from three different university language courses. The last empirical study introduces a complementary data set from working life. The thesis grounds its arguments on a discourse perspective of meaning. Rather than considering meaning as a property of a text or discourse, meaning is seen to reside in the active efforts of the participants of a social situation. In the particular case of computer-supported learning, a multiplicity of modes has to be taken into consideration. Language, in the sense of words, is a partial bearer of meaning only. The theoretical framework advances from a discussion of computer-supported learning as a hybrid form of interaction to a discussion of situated perspectives and computer-supported learning. The research approach applies multiple perspectives due to the multimodal and polycontextual nature of computer-supported learning. Special emphasis is laid on reaching the participant perspective. The findings highlight the multidimensional and polycontextual character of participation in computer-supported learning. The resources that the participants use for meaning-making reach beyond the textual interaction in the learning platform. Furthermore, the participants have multiple ways of taking part in the educational activities. The context that the participants produce for their actions exceeds the limits of the learning platform and ties the activity to the surrounding world in many ways.

Syftet med den här undersökningen är att få en bättre förståelse gällande den föredragna kommunikationskanalen och om den ändras beroende på vilken position inom organisationen som personen för tillfället har. Vi lever i en värld där både det arbetsrelaterade livet och privatlivet till stor del beror på möjligheten att hålla sig uppdaterad angående situationer som sker över hela världen samt med sina kamrater med hjälp av olika IT-lösningar. Tidigare forskning visar att en majoritet av forskningsgrupperna föredrar kommunikation ansikte mot ansikte. Den här undersökningen bestod av intervjuer med individer på olika positioner i företagsstegen för att se vad de hade för åsikter kring ämnet. Respondenterna representerade båda könen, i varierande ålder och har varit anställda mellan ett till tio år i organisationen. Resultaten av undersökningen skiljde sig från tidigare forskning då merparten av respondenterna var positiva till skriftlig kommunikation (mail). / The purpose of this research is to better understand if the prefered way of communication differs depending on which organizational position the person currently holds. Since we are now living in a world where both work related life and private life to a greater scale depends on the ability to keep yourself updated with both the situation worldwide and communication with your peers with the help of different IT solutions. Earlier research results show that a majority of research groups prefers face to face communication. This research used interviews with people on different steps of the corporate ladder to find out what their standing were on the subject. The respondents where both male and female, in varying age and had been employed from one to ten years in the organization. The results found in this research were not equivalent with the earlier research since our results found that almost all respondents were pro written communication (e-mail).

Doctor of Philosophy / Curriculum and Instruction / Diane McGrath / This naturalistic case study was designed to provide descriptive data to examine the possible role of student learning styles in their collaborative participatory behaviors in an online text-based learning environment; and whether the technology-rich environment that promotes collaborative, project-based learning can have an effect on learners’ participation behavior from the point of view of learning styles. In this study, graduate and advanced undergraduate students’ discussion posts, project reports, reflections, and archived chat records were carefully analyzed. The research results indicated that, in an online collaborative learning environment participants were observed to use the Convergent, Divergent and Accommodating learning styles more often than Assimilating learning styles. Indeed, participants with the Assimilating learning style did not show a positive attitude towards online collaboration. Moreover, students who took a leadership role had their learning style kite shape close to the Concrete Experience learning mode; others who were more supportive had their kite shape close to the Reflective Observation “watching”; and those usually took both a leadership role and a supportive role and were comfortable with a variety of learning modes had their kite shape balanced along two or more dimensions of the learning cycles. The discussion of identified themes in this study is related to Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory framework. The study provides extended implications and suggestions for future research.

In this study, individually written essays are compared with interactively written chat texts with the aim to investigate, describe and to some extent explain what happens to the language and the writing during a chat session. Students in a Swedish upper secondary school studying Spanish A2 completed two jigsaw tasks through writing and the texts were analyzed from a descriptive grammatical and stylistic perspective through variable analysis. In the results, the essays tended to be more complex syntactically whereas the chat texts showed more variation and accuracy regarding verb conjugation. As to fluency (text length), number of clauses and verbal forms there were no major differences. Chatting in school environment seemed to become semiformal in this study, with many incomplete sentences and interjections, but with few extra-linguistic signs and only some decline in the usage of accents. A challenging feature of the chat practice is that the interactivity makes the final text result an inseparable entity of two individual texts both regarding content and language. At the same time the interactivity could be the reason for the higher variation and accuracy of the verb conjugation in the chat texts of this study.

This study investigates Chinese online users’ adoptions of various languages and other meaning making signs in their online literacy practices in two popular Chinese CMC sites, Weibo (micro-blogging) and bilibili.com (video-sharing). Adopting the theoretical framework of heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1981), I explore how various meaning making resources are creatively and playfully utilized by Chinese users in their online communication. After two-month data collection, I sampled the non-standard literacy practices (e.g., foreign language transliteration) identified from micro-blogging postings and comments in Weibo, as well as spontaneous (known as “bullet curtain” comments) and traditional text-box comments from featured videos in bilibili.com. The findings resulted in 30,005 non-standard literacy practice types which contain meaning making features from languages (e.g., stylized Chinese Mandarin) and other meaning making signs (e.g., emojis) from both sites. The analysis suggests that Chinese online communication are noticeably hybrid with plurillingual and non-linguistic semiotic resources. These practices reflect the Bakhtinian notion of heteroglossic communication in which people stylize their language use with various meaning making resources. In addition, many practices are also “carnivalesque” (Bakhtin, 1984) which is characterized with creativity and playfulness. The study further deconstructs the notion of multilingualism and extends the discussion of how online communication opens up space for non-conventional and creative literacy practices, which potentially challenge the authoritative policies and voices.

Telecommuting is becoming an increasingly popular trend in the modern workforce. Among the growing number of teleworkers are engineers, a profession where communication is a necessity. This study employs a phenomenological research approach to understand and describe the ways in which information communication technology (ICT) affects teleworking engineers’ interpersonal communication in the workplace and perceptions of isolation in social and organizational contexts. Uses and gratifications theory and media richness theory were used to better understand teleworkers’ selection and use of ICT. The findings revealed six themes: emotional impact, workplace relationships, information communication technology in the workplace, the nature of telework, telework and connectivity, and the organizational role in telework. This study contributes to communication research by adding to the growing body of knowledge about the influence of telework on workplace communication and relationships from the perspective of a niche population, engineers.

After providing an historical overview of the French spelling system and orthographic variation, this study analyzes selected internal (i.e., linguistic) factors and one external (i.e., social) factor that can influence the use of diacritics in online French-language chat sessions. From a corpus of synchronous computer-mediated communication, 3,855 tokens of graphemes capable of bearing diacritics were coded with the following scheme: Letter, Diacritic, Grapheme (i.e., Letter and Diacritic combined), Date of Participation, and Age Group of Participant. A multivariate (VARBRUL) analysis determined that Grapheme exerts the most influence on variation.

[pt] A presença social em um ambiente virtual de aprendizagem: uma proposta de análise à luz da Linguística Sistêmico-Funcional é um estudo de caso interpretativista dos elementos que contribuem para a co-presença (Goffman, 1963) e para a representação do eu (Goffman, 1959/2009) em um contexto pedagógico on-line. Adotando uma visão Sistêmico-Funcional da linguagem (Halliday, 1994), a tese analisa, pelo viés das variáveis Campo, Modo e Relação (Halliday e Hasan, 1989) e da Teoria da Valoração (Martin, 2000), 510 textos escritos por treze professores de idiomas em um curso de dez semanas no TelEduc sobre a produção de material digital. O corpus contém amostras coletadas em três ferramentas: perfil, fórum de discussão, e portfólio. A tese propõe um modelo teórico-metodológico que engloba o estudo das funções discursivas, dos recursos para aproximar a escrita da fala, das escolhas lexicogramaticais referentes a Participantes e Processos, além de manifestações de Afeto, Julgamento e Apreciação. Contempla, também, uma categorização dos tipos de mensagens e como estas se relacionam para formar conversas, ou cadeias, entre os participantes. O estudo aponta que o perfil é o único espaço em que há apenas uma ação social (se apresentar ao grupo). Nos fóruns e portfólios, nos quais há seis outras ações, os pedidos de ajuda e os oferecimentos de soluções ou de apoio moral são as ações mais frequentes, seguidas pelo provimento de feedback sobre as atividades dos colegas nos portfólios. Esse resultado sugere que a natureza prática do curso faz com que as reflexões sobre as leituras e as atividades-modelo, apesar de obrigatórias, fiquem em segundo plano. Há também mensagens que visam somente à socialização (pedidos de desculpa, por exemplo), à autoavaliações, e à descrição das atividades nos portfólios. Dependendo do Campo e da ferramenta, essas ações são mais comumente realizadas de modo independente, gerando textos orientados para um único propósito comunicativo (amostras de Campo simples), ou são combinadas (amostras de Campo combinado), gerando textos com propósitos múltiplos, principalmente visando a salvar a face do autor. Para construir um senso de comunidade, muito contribuem a função discursiva identificar-se com o outro e os recursos que tendem a emular a fala, o que torna a escrita mais pessoal e interativa. A visão dos sujeitos se faz presente na tese por meio das opiniões coletadas em dois questionários on-line e em uma entrevista via email. O cruzamento dos comportamentos linguísticos e das opiniões dos participantes revela que há alguns desencontros entre o que se espera e o que acontece no espaço de interação, especialmente no que tange o provimento de respostas nos fóruns, verificável pela análise das funções perguntar e questionar, e o conteúdo apresentado nos perfis, verificável pela análise das funções discursivas que estruturam os mesmos. Essas evidências apontam para possíveis implicações pedagógicas, as quais podem requerer revisões de práticas docentes e discentes nos cursos on-line. / [en] Social presence in a virtual learning environment: an analysis proposal in light of Systemic Functional Linguistics is an interpretive case study of the elements which contribute to co-presence (Goffman, 1963) and to the presentation of the self (Goffman, 1959/2009) in an online pedagogical context. Adopting a Systemic Functional view of language (Halliday, 1994) and drawing on the study of the variables Field, Tenor and Mode (Halliday and Hasan, 1989) and Appraisal Theory (Martin, 2000), this thesis examines 510 texts written by thirteen language teachers in a ten-week-course held in TelEduc, whose aim was to enable participants to produce digital teaching materials. The corpus contains samples that are representative of the linguistic exchanges in the students’ profiles, forum messages and portfolio messages. The theoretical and methodological framework of the study encompasses the discursive functions which make writing more interactive, specifically, the resources that simulate speech in the written mode and the students’ lexicogramatical choices as regards Participants and Processes as well as expressions of Affect, Judgment and Appreciation. The study also categorizes the types of messages posted and analyzes how they relate to one another to form conversations (chains) between participants. The study shows that the profile is the only tool in which there is a single social action. In the eleven forums and in the 13 portfolios, where six other actions take place, requests and offers for help or moral support are the most frequent, followed by feedback on the activities designed by colleagues. This suggests that the practical nature of the course makes the reflections on the readings and model activities less frequent, despite being compulsory. There are also messages whose objective is just socialization (apologies for example), selfassessment, and description of the activities posted on the portfolios. Depending on the Field and the tool, these actions are most commonly performed independently, generating single communicative purpose texts (Simple Field samples) or they may be combined, for example, an apology, a reflection and evaluation in one text (a Combined Field sample). Authors use this kind of combination mainly so that they can save face. The discourse function identifying with peers and the resources used for simulating speech, which make writing more personal and interactive, greatly contribute to build a sense of community. The participants’ perceptions, collected in two online questionnaires and in an email interview, provide further information that complements the linguistic study of the participants’ realization of social action. The triangulation of the linguistic behavior observed and the participants’ opinions shows that there are some mismatches between what can be expected from the survey of the literature and what happens in the online space of interaction. In particular, the triangulation highlights the expectation of answers in the forums, detected through the analysis of the discursive functions asking question and questioning, and the content of the profiles. Such evidence points to possible pedagogical implications, which could involve a review of practices in online courses.