Language and the Media

1995 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 23-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Bell

Media language has always attracted the attention of linguists, particularly applied linguists and sociolinguists. There are four practical and principled reasons for this interest. First, the media provide an easily accessible source of language data for research and teaching purposes. Second, the media are important linguistic institutions. Their output makes up a large proportion of the language that people hear and read every day. Media usage reflects and shapes both language use and attitudes in a speech community. For second language learners, the media may function as the primary—or even the sole—source of native-speaker models. Third, the ways in which the media use language are interesting linguistically in their own right; these include how different dialects and languages are used in advertising, how tabloid newspapers use language in a projection of their assumed readers' speech, or how radio personalities use language—and only language–to construct their own images and their relationships to an unseen, unknown audience. Fourth, the media are important social institutions. They are crucial presenters of culture, politics, and social life, shaping as well as reflecting how these are formed and expressed. Media ‘discourse’ is important both for what it reveals about a society and for what it contributes to the character of society.

Author(s):  
Roger A. Atinga ◽  
Nafisa Mummy Issifu Alhassan ◽  
Alice Ayawine

Background: Research about the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), its epidemiology and socio-economic impact on populations worldwide has gained attention. However, there is dearth of empirical knowledge in low- and middle-income settings about the pandemic’s impact on survivors, particularly the tension of their everyday life arising from the experiences and consequences of stigma, discrimination and social exclusion, and how they cope with these behavioral adversities. Methods: Realist qualitative approach drawing data from people clinically diagnosed positive of COVID-19, admitted into therapy in a designated treatment facility, and subsequently recovered and discharged for or without follow-up domiciliary care. In-depth interviews were conducted by maintaining a code book for identifying and documenting thematic categories in a progression leading to thematic saturation with 45 participants. Data were transcribed and coded deductively for broad themes at the start before systematically nesting emerging themes into the broad ones with the aid of NVivo 12 software. Results: Everyday lived experiences of the participants were disrupted with acts of indirect stigmatization (against relatives and family members), direct stigmatization (labeling, prejudices and stereotyping), barriers to realizing full social life and discriminatory behaviors across socio-ecological structures (workplace, community, family, and social institutions). These behavioral adversities were associated with self-reported poor health, anxiety and psychological disorders, and frustrations among others. Consequently, supplicatory prayers, societal and organizational withdrawal, aggressive behaviors, supportive counseling, and self-assertive behaviors were adopted to cope and modify the adverse behaviors driven by misinformation and fearful perceptions of the COVID-19 and its contagious proportions. Conclusion: In the face of the analysis, social campaigns and dissemination of toolkits that can trigger behavior change and responsible behaviors toward COVID-19 survivors are proposed to be implemented by health stakeholders, policy and decision makers in partnership with social influencers, the media, and telecoms.


2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
TERRY NADASDI ◽  
RAYMOND MOUGEON ◽  
KATHERINE REHNER

ABSTRACTOur paper examines lexical variation in the spoken French of second language learners and focuses on words referring to the notion of ‘automobile’ (i.e., automobile, auto, voiture, char and machine). Results reveal that while students do follow the native speaker pattern of using the neutral variant auto in most instances, they diverge from native speakers by making no use of the vernacular form char and relatively high use of the prestige variant voiture. The principal external factors that influence variant choice are students' home language and the representation of variants in the input to which students are exposed.


Author(s):  
Aarnes Gudmestad

The current study builds on research on mood distinction in Spanish, which has focused on the subjunctive mood, by examining the full inventory of verb forms that second-language learners and native speakers (NSs) of Spanish use in mood-choice contexts. Twenty NSs and 130 learners corresponding to five proficiency levels completed three oral-elicitation tasks. The results show that participants use a wide repertoire of tense/mood/aspect forms in mood-choice contexts and that NSs and learners use largely the same forms. An analysis of the conditional and imperfect suggests that learners tend to restructure and strengthen their form-function connections between these verb forms and a range of functions.


Author(s):  
А.В. Полонский ◽  
В.Г. Глушкова ◽  
М.А. Ряполова

В культуре XXI века к наиболее значимым понятиям, отражающим ее своеобразие, доминирующий тип сознания, социальных, культурных и коммуникативных практик, характер мотивирующих социальные преобразования факторов, относится понятие «медиа». Медиатизация, то есть процесс вовлечения человека и общества в сферу медиа, обусловлена как стремительными инновациями в коммуникационно-технологической среде, так и изменениями в самом человеке, формированием у него устойчивой потребности, с одной стороны, в информации, в ее непрерывном увеличении, обновлении и расширении ее проблемно-тематического спектра, а с другой - в публичной самопрезентации, в управлении вниманием и впечатлением целевых аудиторий. Медиа, внедряясь во все сферы жизни и деятельности современного общества, неизбежно преобразуют его социальные институты, практики, тексты и язык. Предметом рассмотрения в статье являются отдельные особенности языка, функционирующего в современной медийной среде и ставшего сегодня, благодаря форсированному расширению его социальной базы и включению в самые разные коммуникативные обстоятельства, важнейшей формой существования общенародного языка. Язык медиа «живет» во времени, в культуре, в сознании каждой личности и в конкретном, обусловленном социальным контекстом, коммуникативной ситуацией и медийной технологией информационно-речевом общении, аккумулируя опыт, знания и ценности, интеллектуальные и эмоциональные ресурсы, а также отмеченные и интерпретированные человеком и обществом содержательные параметры социального бытия. В то же время он сам формирует культурные каноны и их мировоззренческие принципы, прокладывая человеку путь как к высотам культуры, так и к ее низам. In the culture of the XXI century, the most significant concepts reflecting its originality, the dominant type of consciousness, social, cultural and communicative practices, the nature of factors motivating social transformations include the concept of "media". Mediatization, that is, the process of involving a person and society in the media sphere, is due to both rapid innovations in the communication and technological environment and changes in the person himself, the formation of a stable need in him, on the one hand, for information, for its continuous increase, updating and expanding its problem-thematic spectrum, and on the other - in public self-presentation, in managing the attention and impression of target audiences. Media, penetrating into all spheres of life and activities of modern society, inevitably transforms its social institutions, practices, texts and language. The subject of consideration in the article is the individual features of the language that functions in the modern media environment and has become today, thanks to the accelerated expansion of its social base and inclusion in a variety of communicative circumstances, the most important form of existence of the national language. The language of the media "lives" in time, in culture, in the consciousness of each individual and in a specific information-speech communication conditioned by the social context and media technology, accumulating experience, knowledge and values, intellectual and emotional resources, as well as marked and interpreted a person and a society meaningful parameters of social life. At the same time, it itself forms the cultural canons and their worldview principles, paving the way for a person both to the heights of culture and to its bottom.


1984 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell S. Tomlin

This paper compares the foregrounding strategies of native speakers of English and advanced learners of ESL. Fifteen native speakers and thirty-five advanced learners produced on-line (play-by-play) descriptions of the unfolding action in an animated videotape. A methodology for the quantitative analysis of discourse production is described which permits the explicit identification of foreground-background information and its interaction with both native speaker and interlanguage syntaxes. Results show that: (1) Native speakers and learners exhibit one universal discourse strategy in retreating to a more pragmatic mode of communication under the severe communicative stress of on-line description, as revealed through the systematic loss of the coding relations ordinarily holding between foreground-background information and clause independence/tense-aspect; (2) Learners also exhibit a learner-specific general communication strategy in which significant events are described but nonsignificant events avoided.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tetyana Sydorenko

AbstractThis study examines the effect of oral practice via computer-delivered structured tasks (CASTs) with native speaker (NS) models and open-ended tasks without NS input (i.e., learner-leaner role-plays) on pragmatic development of second language learners. While prior studies have indicated that structured tasks afford more opportunities for focus on form (FonF) than open-ended tasks (


1984 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Gass

ABSTRACTThis study examines the acquisition of production and perception by adult learners of English. The particular focus is voice onset time of initial /b/'s and /p/'s. The subjects are 10 nonnative speakers of English and six native speakers who provided identification responses to synthesized stimuli varying along a voice onset time continuum. Additionally, they each produced words with initial /b/'s and /p/'s. These measures were repeated at three 1-month intervals for the nonnative speakers. The results show that nonnative speaker perception differs from native speaker perception in two important ways: (1) stop consonants are perceived continuously rather than categorically and (2) nonnative speaker perception is influenced by the location of phoneme boundaries in both the native and target languages. Nonnative speaker production shows a greater amount of similarity to native speaker production, although, where deviations occur, nonnative speakers tend to overcompensate for differences between the native and target languages. Finally, methodological issues are raised relating to the comparison of perception and production.


2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (8) ◽  
pp. 1870-1887 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Gillon Dowens ◽  
Marta Vergara ◽  
Horacio A. Barber ◽  
Manuel Carreiras

The goal of the present study was to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of second-language (L2) morphosyntactic processing in highly proficient late learners of an L2 with long exposure to the L2 environment. ERPs were collected from 22 English–Spanish late learners while they read sentences in which morphosyntactic features of the L2 present or not present in the first language (number and gender agreement, respectively) were manipulated at two different sentence positions—within and across phrases. The results for a control group of age-matched native-speaker Spanish participants included an ERP pattern of LAN-type early negativity followed by P600 effect in response to both agreement violations and for both sentence positions. The late L2 learner results included a similar pattern, consisting of early negativity followed by P600, in the first sentence position (within-phrase agreement violations) but only P600 effects in the second sentence position (across-phrase agreement violation), as well as significant amplitude and onset latency differences between the gender and the number violation effects in both sentence positions. These results reveal that highly proficient learners can show electrophysiological correlates during L2 processing that are qualitatively similar to those of native speakers, but the results also indicate the contribution of factors such as age of acquisition and transfer processes from first language to L2.


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