This dissertation is an investigation of the use, change, and status of the distinctive local dialect in rural Valdres, Norway. The Norwegian sociolinguistic situation has long been recognized as complicated by a protracted history of language planning and standardization, in which two competing written norms of Norwegian, called Bokmål and Nynorsk, are symbolically and ideologically associated with urban and rural identities, respectively. In addition, while Norwegians can choose from two written norms, no recognized standard exists for spoken Norwegian, and citizens are officially encouraged to use their native, local dialects. The present study approaches this situation through a case study of language use in Valdres today.In the summer of 2005, the distinctive dialect of the rural Valdres valley was voted "Norway's most popular dialect" on one of the country's most listened-to national radio programs, an event that both reflects and has contributed to a recent revaluation of the local dialect. Yet the results of previous dialectological research in Valdres have clearly pointed to long-term convergence toward what locals call "city language" -- the speech of nearby urban Oslo. While evidence of this decades-long trend is not contradicted by the findings of this dissertation research, the present study suggests that there may be more than one direction of dialect change in Valdres today. Despite ongoing changes in dialect morpho-lexis and phonology in the direction of urban regional speech, there is also a large number of relatively resistant dialect features in contemporary Valdresmål, and, even more importantly, evidence of a re-expansion of the dialect among younger speakers, which appears to align with forms found in written Nynorsk, the alternative "rural" norm. The simultaneous sociolinguistic trends of dialect convergence, non-convergence, and divergence in the contemporary Valdres dialect vis-a-vis urban regional norms thus provide an interesting and complicated case of language variation and change.This dissertation combines methods from linguistic and cultural anthropology, ethnographic sociolinguistics, and acoustic phonetics to provide an illuminating analysis of the local relationships between standard and non-standard varieties, between written and spoken forms, and between contemporary language use and historically-rooted language ideologies.

Thesis (M.I.T.)--The Evergreen State College, 2010. / Title from title screen (viewed 7/7/2010). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 119-125).

This dissertation identifies if and how graduate teaching assistants and instructors working in the field of rhetoric and composition teach multimodal assignments in first-year composition (FYC) courses. The research questions for this study were as follows: 1) In what ways do graduate teaching assistants and faculty teach multimodal assignments in FYC courses? 2) Are graduate teaching assistants, adjuncts, and contract faculty equally as likely as assistant, associate, and full professors to teach multimodal assignments in FYC courses? 3) What kinds of training do graduate teaching assistants and faculty receive to prepare them to teach multimodal assignments in FYC courses? 4) Do graduate teaching assistants and faculty feel the kinds of training they receive adequately prepare them to teach multimodal assignments in FYC courses? If not, what needs to change? These research questions were investigated using a combination of online survey research methods and follow-up interviews. This study provides a broad and current analysis, as well as a reflective picture, of the teaching of multimodal assignments in FYC courses. As a result of quickly evolving technologies, instructors have potentially more opportunities to teach multimodal assignments. However, in some cases, writing program policies and curriculum limit or make it difficult for graduate teaching assistants and instructors to assign multimodal assignments in FYC courses. Thus, this study investigated the ways current graduate teaching assistants and/or instructors teach multimodal assignments despite difficulties and limitations. It also investigated whether or not graduate teaching assistants and instructors receive any training or help in shaping their multimodal pedagogy and whether or not they feel this training or help was adequate. The findings indicate instructors are more willing than their departments to implement multimodal composition pedagogy. The findings also show that instructors teach multimodal assignments in their classrooms in various ways, including the use of different technologies and resources. Evidence suggests that despite their desire for more help from their departments, instructors teach themselves how to use such technologies and resources to implement their multimodal composition pedagogy. The study concludes that how multimodal composition pedagogy is implemented in a writing classroom is more likely an individual instructor’s decision rather than a department’s decision. / Department of English

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

Title: The Use of Media in the EFL Classrooms at Secondary Schools in the 21st Century Author: Bc. Lucie Slavíková Department: Department of English Language and Literature Supervisor: PhDr. Radek Vít, Ph.D. Abstract The aim of this diploma thesis is to explore and compare various types of the old and the new media, which are commonly used in the EFL classrooms at the Czech secondary schools in the 21st century. The key question is to what extent are the new media implemented into the English lessons at the Czech grammar and secondary technical and vocational schools. The findings of the online questionnaire survey, which was conducted on the random sample of the Czech secondary school teachers of English and on the sample of the 15 or 16 years old first grade secondary school students of English proved that both the old and the new media are commonly used in the English lessons. However, despite the fact that the lives of the 21st century students are largely influenced by the new media, the English teachers use the old media more often. It is recommended that more initiatives and programmes should be directed at the promotion of the implementation of the new media into the English lessons and also at the training of the teachers in using them effectively. Key words English language teaching, media...

The thesis The use of language in modern internet journalism in comparison with print focuses on use of language in texts on the Internet and in print media. The texts which were selected for exploration are movie reviews. The theoretical part describes the terms used in the work (film review, internet journalism, etc.). It also tries to clarify the issue of Internet publishing and the differences between online publishing and printed media. It then briefly describes the history of the Internet and its establishment as a counterpart to the printed media. It also deals with the description of the media from which the texts were sourced. The practical part presents the results of the analysis. The work compares the differences in texts published on the Internet and in printed media, as well as the advantages of online publishing - with all the potential of hypertext. The concluding part of the work evaluates whether the researched articles are different and how.

The main objective of this thesis called "Language Innovations in Mass Media" is to identify and compare language innovations in articles produced by major printed mass medium with language innovations in news programme broadcasted by public TV channel. Thesis aims to describe actual trends of language innovations, specifically lexical and word-building process. Overall, author analysed language of 17,723 reports and 1,174 articles from TV programme Události (produced by Česká televize and broadcasted daily at 7pm) and front pages of daily newspaper (MF DNES) from one-year period. Author detects similar patterns in terms of language innovations in both sources, however, the realization of the innovations is different.

Nicht zuletzt aufgrund der hohen Zahl an Flüchtlingen in Deutschland erfährt auch das Lehren und Lernen von Deutsch als Fremdsprache einen Bedeutungsaufschwung. In dieser Ausgabe von Medienwelten werden zwei Studien vorgestellt, die auf ganz unterschiedliche Art und Weise die Frage nach einer medienpädagogischen Herangehensweise im Deutsch als Fremdsprache-Unterricht stellen.

Lugha inaweza kutumiwa kwa njia ya ubunifu wenye ufasaha ufaao ili kuwasiliana au pia ikatumiwa visivyo na kwa njia potovu. Ni nini hasa maana ya kutumia lugha kwa njia potovu? Pengine ni rahisi kueleza kinyume chake. Mtumiaji wa lugha mwenye ubunifu huzingatia rasimali zote za lugha. Mwandishi maarufu wa fasihi barani Afrika, Chinua Achebe, huitumia lugha kama kituo kilicho hai na pia kuendelea. Katika juhudi za kuifanya lugha kumwezesha kutoa maoni, maelekezo, habari na hisia, mtumiaji kama huyu hutambua kuwa lugha ikitumiwa ipasavyo huleta uhai katika taaluma ya mawasiliano. (Luvai, 1991: 60) Hata hivyo, katika Kenya, kiwango che ubora wa uandishi kwa jumla kimeshuka sana katika miaka ishirini iliyopita. Makala hii itachunguza kwa muhtasari ushahidi wa matumizi yasiyofaa ya lugha ya Kiswahili katika vyombo vya habari km. redio, televisheni na magazeti.