Tag: register

Welcome to the third (2020) edition of the Educational Sociolinguistics class blog!

I’m very happy to be the instructor for this course – giving me the opportunity to launch this third edition of the class blog. Thanks and a nod to Alison Crump, who envisioned and created this blog back in 2016, and Mela Sarkar who carried on the tradition in 2019. And thanks for your baton-passing post, Mela! Both Alison and Mela are contributing members of our BILD research community (Mela’s brainchild) which has its own blog and an online, peer edited journal (Alison is co-editor). I encourage you to visit the links to these sites for more interactive discussions about all things sociolinguistic. And if you haven’t already (it was assigned reading for our first class!), be sure to read Alison’s research article about blogging as pedagogy (a.k.a. this blog site).  

As we are currently living through the Covid-19 pandemic, my sociolinguistic noticing often involves issues related to the current crisis. I want to share a youtube video with you that was sent around in our department at the end of March. At that time, our (Canadian) medical experts were not advising ‘masks for all’ – although masks were suggested or required in specific situations/locations such as on airplanes and in hospitals.

Since then, wearing masks in public has been mandated in Quebec and across the country.  

This video impressed me for a number of reasons, apart from the very clear and compelling message, and I can spin some of these as sociolinguistic: 

1. The register of this message. (Why did I find the delivery of this message so compelling and appropriate?)

2. The clarity of this message in English, by an ESL speaker. (Why do I think the speaker in the video learned English as a second/foreign/additional language?)

3. What type of speech act or event would you categorize this as?

We have only had one class together so far, but I already have an inkling of the rich language-related experiences that the class brings, and intellectual and creative thinking that this class is capable of. I look forward to being inspired by your blog postings over this term.

Texting: A New Register or Style in the L2 Curriculum?

Bonnie Reimer

The blog is somewhat related to the interesting perspective Melissa brought to texting last week.  Since I have some slightly different issues and perspectives to share, I thought it would be better to post a new blog rather than comment.

A couple years ago, I was teaching paragraph writing to a low intermediate ESL class of adult newcomers from various countries. One of the students, who had been in Canada almost a year, had recently started the level and was just beginning to write compound sentences, so his assignment was to write a paragraph of about 75-100 words incorporating both simple and compound sentences. At the time, we had not covered register or style, but I was still quite taken aback when this Afghani male in his 30s emailed me the paragraph completely in textese, some of which I could not decipher. This learner was able to clearly read the paragraph to me though he had difficulty expressing his writing in a more formal style. This was the first and only time I had received a writing sample in textese although I occasionally receive writing with abbreviations and symbols. I had hoped to get some input from my colleagues, but this had never happened in any of their classes.

Continue reading “Texting: A New Register or Style in the L2 Curriculum?”

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