Welcome readers!
“Tech gives the quietest student a voice.”
– Jerry Blumengarten
Language is dynamic, always ready for change. Technology has played an important role in bringing this change. The language kept constantly evolving. This blog post mentions some of the views of David Crystal as he speaks in a particular context of English Language & ELT. Watch the videos or read the views here.
David Crystal is a British linguist, academic, and author. He has Crystal has authored, co-authored, and edited over 120 books on a wide variety of subjects, specialising among other things in editing reference works, including (as author) the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. He is also an expert in the evolution of the English language.
1. David Crystal: The Effect of New Technologies on Engish:
David Crystal talks in this video about how Technology always has influenced the language. He discussed how new advances affect English today. There are new forms, types of English. For example, newspapers. Earlier people consider the telephone to be a disaster as it would not allow people or people won't feel convenient to talk face to face! Broadcasting has presented another form of language, for example, editorials in-game, and news perusing climate, and talk shows.
Most of us wouldn't have known much details of things without the internet. World wide web arrived in 1991 to blogging when it arrived 1997 and coming to Facebook, Twitter- these are the technologies developing into new styles of English. Each of these has a distinctive English style. The Internet is likewise impacting the language individuals use today. Social Networking has a tremendous influence in the present language model that is Twitter, it initially began in 2006 David Crystal discusses how the interpersonal interaction sites demonstrated that all the activities should be documented.
People who used the site started using many first-person pronouns, present tenses. Then in 2009 twitter then changed his prompt to 'what' happening?' there is a sudden change in pronouns, there is a third person pronoun being used. He suggests that it would take a long time before the different types of technologies would influence people's language.
According to David Crystal, the English language is still the same as it used to be, there are only new abbreviations that have come into peoples language such as 'lol' but this hasn't had a huge impact on peoples language. The average number of people that use abreviations is only 10% not having a huge impact on people's lexical choice, and the other 90% of the language most of the people use is standard english.
David Crystal: The Biggest Challange for English Language Teachers in the times of Internet
From the interview with David Crystal in Belgrade on 9 November 2013, the video opens with a concerning state that the biggest challenge without a doubt for English teachers is to keep pace with language change.
Language is changing for two reasons-
1. Internet is fostering new varieties and new experiences faster than ever before. Earlier coining a new word would use to take a generation before the rest of the world knew about that. If a new word is invented today and is uploaded on Facebook, everyone may know about that in less than 24 hours.
As students are already aged of teachers, teachers have to keep pace with it.
The technological language which the older generation uses is different from the language which the younger generation uses.
2. The globalization of English, when both teachers and students go out in a wide world and encounter the forte in English language. For teacher it is evident that they retain the respect for traditional accent reason being that's the actual dialect. But not to think that it's a only accent and dialect in the world, than teacher have done them a disservice.
The teacher must improve student's listening comprehension and reading comprehension from the very beginning. To expose them to the variations that exists in English. This will make the students ready for accepting the difference, ready to encounter anything. Along with this it is necessary for a teacher again to become a conservative while preparing students for examination because examination boards are notoriously conservative.
The two most difficult jobs in the world are translating and interpreting and secondly language teaching. The reason is because no aspect of human is complex than language. Three quarters of the world's population is bilingual and to consider phonemes, syllables, intonation, rhythm and stress combined into grammatical constructions. A kind of complex professionalism needs to be reflected in salary scale of teachers.
"The only languages which do not change are dead ones."
- David Crystal
David Crystal: Texting is 'Good' for the English Language
"People sometimes say: 'A picture is worth a thousand words.' That's true. But language is never far away. To talk about the picture, you may need a thousand words."
- David Crystal (A Little book of Language)
Texting is a kind of language and language is studied by linguistics. As a professor of linguistics, David Crystal has written a book on texting. David Crystal debunks the myths that texting is done by kids only, text messages with abbreviations are entirely abbreviated, abbreviations invented by kids is a modern thing. Because the kids are leaving the letters out they don't know how to spell, students are putting this into their essays, in examinations they are going to rear a generation to be totally illiterate.
As literary (learning to read and write) is important and it requires practice, technology becomes of great help in providing stunning opportunities to practice reading and writing. The research says that the more you text, the better your literacy scores are.
So David Crystal's theory is that the texting language is good for English language as it is not causing English language to deteriorate.
"I believe that any form of writing exercise is good for you. I also believe that any form of tuition which helps develop your awareness of the different properties, styles, and effects of writing is good for you. It helps you become a better reader, more sensitive to nuance, and a better writer, more sensitive to audience. Texting language is no different from other innovative forms of written expression that have emerged in the past. It is a type of language whose communicative strengths and weaknesses need to be appreciated."
-David Crystal
Thank you.
Post a Comment