Second Language Socialization in a Bilingual Chat Room: Global and Local Considerations

By Wan Shun Eva Lam. Language Learning & Technology, 2004

335 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper considers how global practices of English on the Internet intersect with local practices of English in the territorial or national sphere in constructing the language experiences of immigrant learners. Using a multi-contextual approach to language socialization, this paper examines the social and discursive practices in a Chinese/English bilingual chat room and how this Internet chat room provides an additional context of language socialization for two teenage Chinese immigrants in the US. Analysis of discourse, interview, and observational data reveals that a mixed-code variety of English is adopted and developed among the focal youth and their peers around the globe to construct their relationships as bilingual speakers of English and Cantonese. This language variety served to create a collective ethnic identity for these young people and allowed the girls to assume a new identity in speaking English that doesn't follow the social categories of English-speaking Americans versus Cantonese-speaking Chinese in their local American context. This paper makes the case for studying how people navigate across contexts of socialization in the locality of the nation-state and the virtual environments of the Internet to articulate new ways of using English.

Subfields: Language and Linguistics, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/02dca9f1ba020db71717cf293862f53d4515255a

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Citations in the corpus

Toward a Corridista Consciousness: Learning From One Transnational Youth's Critical Reading, Writing, and Performance of Mexican Corridos (2018, background): “Several scholars studying immigrant and transnational children’s literacies have looked to New Literacy Studies (Bartlett, 2007; Lam, 2004) and critical sociocultural literacy (Ghiso, 2016) because of their expansive understandings of literacy beyond the printed world and as something influenced by ”
Situated Learning through Social Networking Communities: The Development of Joint Enterprise, Mutual Engagement, and a Shared Repertoire. (2011, positive): “Lam (2004) claims that students engage in varied communicative practices within online environments which allow them to adopt new identities through language.”
Second Language Use, Socialization, and Learning in Internet Interest Communities and Online Gaming (2009, background): “Lam (2004) has explored how an online chat room for Chinese diaspora youth provides an alternative to English as a foreign language classroom contexts for L2 language socialization.”
Fostering Learner Autonomy in English for Science: A Collaborative Digital Video Project in a Technological Learning Environment (2011, background): “…interest to us here is one strand of this literature, which investigates the ways in which students can make use of digital technology, especially digital images and video, in order to construct personally meaningful digital stories that reflect the kind of media which students are exposed…”
Multilingual Communication and Language Acquisition: New Research Directions. (2011, background): “Other scholars like Lam (2004) have also pointed out how on the Internet multilingual youth bond as members of a global English speaking community and negotiate the language in their own terms.”
Perspectives on Technology in Learning and Teaching Languages (2006, background): “For example, Lam (2004) documents the socialization of two bilingual immigrant Chinese girls’ experiences in a chat room in which the participants develop a hybrid language variety that distinguishes them from both their English-only peers and their Cantonese-only peers.”
Language, Culture, and Identity in Online Fanfiction (2006, background): “Save for a few studies (Lam, 2000, 2004, 2005; Yi, 2005), there has been little inquiry into the roles of popular and fan culture in the online literacy and social practices of English language learning youth.”
Biliteracy and trilingual practices in the home context: Case studies of Chinese-Canadian children (2006, background): “For such learners, language practices do not exist in isolation from each other, just as cultures and communities do not exist as discrete entities, but rather interact with each other in various degrees of complementarity or conflict (Lam, 2004).”