A Socio-Linguistic Study
Literature Review
A Socio-Linguistic Study
Abstract
The enduring widespread political and public engagements in the Arab world have actually empowered many segments of the public in those regions. The debate on the impact of social media on various aspects of the Arab world as well as globally continues among the Arab policy makers. The incessant strong progress, acceptance and diversity of the usage of social media platforms across the entire Arab world in the recent years, specifically in 2012points to the fact that many well-known movements like the Arab Spring and extensive social media usage are sweeping the Arab world. These movements, essentially are believed, to be contributing to an increasingly organic growth of the entire Arab region, while also influencing the connection of the Arabs with the members of their community and society at large. Social media, which was formerly used extensively for social and political purposes in the Arab world, today has moved much beyond this and has become more of a highly professional tool for learning, collaboration, and communication. This study is a literature review of the usage of Instagram, a social media platform, on the Saudi English that is used by the females of that region. The study presents synopsis of a number of relevant studies that have been conducted by researchers earlier, on a number of aspects that are related to this topic.
Literature Review
1. Theoretical framework: Socio-cultural theory, Constructivism and Krashen Input hypothesis.
The question of interaction between language and culture is complex and has many aspects. There are currently several opinions concerning this issue. Some scholars consider language and culture different phenomena that do not coincide either in content of in functions (Ferdinand Saussure): culture is seen as achievements of humankind, the result of conscious activity, whereas the language does not result from this activity and cannot be viewed as an achievement. Others emphasize the connection and inseparability of culture and language, stating that it is possible to consider the relationships between culture and language as the relationships between the whole and its part. The language, according to this view, is the component of culture, and at the same time its tool; at the same time language is autonomous and can be studied separately from culture.
Socio-cultural theory considers language an inseparable part of culture. The spiritual human values constitute the basis of people’s existence, determine the sense and content of their lives. The notion of value - the stable life orientation - cannot be considered separately from its linguistic aspect embodied in the structure of linguistic view of the world and linguistic identity. A linguistic identity is not a mere separate aspect of personality (like legal or economic identity), but rather the development of the very notion of identity. Language and culture, being relatively independent phenomena, are connected via the meaning of the linguistic signs that ensures the ontological entity of language and culture. Each language is the unique system that produces significant impact on the consciousness of its speakers and forms their linguistic world-image that reflects reality via the cultural world-image. The question of relationships between the cultural (conceptual) and linguistic world-images is very complex, and deals with the differences in the way reality is depicted in language and culture.
The role of language, according to socio-linguistic view, is not only in communicating messages, but, in the first place, in internal organization of what needs to be communicated, - in other words, the knowledge about the world that are included into the language. Linguistic world-view includes the knowledge about the world reflected in phraseology, grammar, lexical system; and it is specific for each culture, reflecting the view on the reality of particular ethnic or national group. The connections between language and culture are projected not only to the linguistic world-image but also the linguistic identity.
Constructivism is the theory describing the language as the complex of stable hierarchical constructions. In accordance with constructivism, a language does not have 100$ stable rules, or grammar as such, but only the distribution of probabilities, in accordance with which two elements may, or may not appear next to each other. If the frequency of joint use of two and more element is very high, they form a cluster - one non-divisible and non-analyzed object, which creates the illusion of the “rule”.
Constructivism has developed into being one of the greatest encouragements on the practice of education in the tow and a half decades, as more and more teachers have started embracing constructivist-based pedagogy with excessive rates of enthusiasm, which otherwise is quite rare in today’s highly fast paced and quick fix approach towards schooling and improvement of education. For a number of teachers, the primary focus on constructing a meaning in the process of teaching and learning essentially echoes with former perceptions as constructivist-based instruction places all types of educational priorities firmly upon the learning of students'.
The meaning of constructivism essentially is not the same, as it depends on individual perspective as well as position. In the context of education and learning, there are theoretical meanings that constructivism holds, and also a personal constructivism as Piaget puts it , social constructivism as described by Vygotsky , radical constructivism as outlined by von Glasersfeld , constructivist epistemologies, as well as also educational constructivism.
There are many theories dealing with learning as well as pedagogy within social constructivism and educational constructivism, and the same have had the most prominent impact on the instructional design and curriculum design as they are considered to be possessing the highest degree of conduciveness with respect to integration into the contemporary approaches of education and learning.
Stephen Krashen’s hypothesis of input-based learning is based on the assumptions that people master the language best of all from the messages that are only a little bit higher or further than their current language competencies. Besides, he claimed that the emotional state of the learner can act as a filter that can block the input necessary for language acquisition. "The best methods [of teaching the language] are therefore those that supply 'comprehensible input' in low anxiety situations, containing messages that students really want to hear. These methods do not force early production in the second language, but allow students to produce when they are 'ready', recognizing that improvement comes from supplying communicative and comprehensive input, and not from forcing and correcting production.”
In order for the new material in the language to be assimilated quickly and effectively, the complicatedness of the text should be only a little bit higher than the current level of the learner. If all words and constructions in the text are clearly understood, there will be no significant improvement in skills and knowledge. On the other hand, if the text is too complicated, the learner will not be able to comprehend it at all, or its large parts.
Another aspect of Krashen’s hypothesis is emotions which sometimes can facilitate remembering. Being interested in the subject is always useful, but the attention should not be too focused - ideally, it should be distracted, as in this state the new thoughts, ideas, rules and lexemes are perceived and remembered much better.
Language acquisition is a subliminal course; as the people who try acquiring knowledge are normally unaware of the aspect that they are actually learning a new language, but they just know that the new language would be used for acquisition. Even the competence that a learner acquires through language acquisition is subconscious as well. This is because, most of us are unaware of the rules that are to be followed while acquiring knowledge.
Competence in second language can be obtained through language acquisition and according to a few language theorists, while children acquire language, contrary to this, adults just learn. There is a lot of difference between learning and acquisition. Interestingly, English is possibly the widely studied language based on the natural order hypothesis, and of all structures of English, morphology is the extensively learnt structure.
An Overview of The Social Media
“The environment or climate is widely acknowledged as a vital aspect of the life of an organization or school . The climate or the environment of a school, as opined by Freiberg, is the quality of the working environment which echoes the way in which communication and interaction happens between people, as well as also a measure of the characteristics of a school which is regarded as being a very crucial aspect for teachers, administrators, policy makers and also parents.
The basic notion of schools having a unique and quantifiable or assessable climate was initially identified in the year 1963 by Halpin and Croft. During those years, the achievements of students was usually described based on the socio-economic composition of the school.
An independent research was carried out by McDill, Meyers, and Rigsby, which was instrumental in identifying the social as well as the educational environment of educational institutions, precisely secondary schools, and also identifying if there is a relationship that exists between the school climate and the ambitions and achievements of students.
The mass media is regarded as being one of the numerous factors that has a strong influence upon people. It is largely believed by sociologists worldwide that media has the power to dictate the way people learn about the happenings all over the world, while also directing people about the way to suitably interact with each other.
Several researchers have been carrying out studies for precisely ascertaining the way children understand and construe the messages offered by mass media and the way they incorporate them into their day to day activities and peers.
One such studies assessed the way Taiwanese kindergarten and first grade children incorporated media used in their classrooms into their daily lives as they affianced with the principal Confucian values of the Asian culture. Additionally, there were also other studies the evaluated the way mass media affects sense of preemptive socialization .
Mancuso and Stuth suggested that Instagram is providing an amazingly effective and resourceful image-based storytelling application and is unique. Its distinct aspects like hashtags, “‘@mentions’, geotagging, biography space, follower/following button and photo editing functions were designed to facilitate this ability.”
Instagram has skillfully been very clear since the days of its inception that it has to let the Online Social Networking Community (OSNC) to post their photos simultaneously in various other platforms of social media. This facility of connecting to other social media platforms like Facebook, Tumblr, and Foursquare at the same time, is believed to essentially facilitate internet users to convey their message to other social media platforms. The process of storytelling is hence simplified across various social media platforms, and also across a varied audience.
An overview of Mobile applications
Mobile devices have become an extremely powerful and highly convenient mode of communication these days as they come with numerous tools for helping people in their daily activities. With the sophistication in the mobile technology, learning using mobile devices has been extensively studied in the field of e-learning. Several researches regard it is a significant aspect that helps integrate pedagogical and technical assets of mobile technology into the modern day learning environments.
A majority of the earlier studies regarding mobile technologies has concentrated more on its varied strength in stressing upon the assistance in mobile learning. However, the study of Yu-Lin Jeng, et. al., adopts a highly practical perspective for describing the way mobile technologies enable and assist mobile learning activity.
The current day highly sophisticate mobile technology offers users with two vital features in the contemporary mobile learning research, namely the “situated context and ubiquitous mobility.” Ubiquitous mobility has been regarded and practically applied in various studies in the recent past .
With ubiquitous mobility, the learning activity of the students can be facilitated in the external environment beyond the school, and eventually connect to other peers through network connectivity. Mobile technologies offer extremely opulent degrees of content related to mobile learning while also delivering information in an effective manner for students during several of their learning activities. Moreover, mobility also enables mobile learning to become highly distributed.
Situated context of mobile learning, on the contrary, is an e-learning application, wherein, the learning takes place in the context of various forms of learning materials. This method of mobile learning provides students authentic examples related to learning and they appropriately conform to the context of learning. With this kind of a learning system in place, learners can acquire the context-aware learning materials to boost their learning experience. An excellent example of an extension of this type of situated learning context is the museum guide system.
Research on the use of Instagram
Instagram is an interactive multi-user website whose context is created by its users. The primary content of Instagram are photographs, often containing short descriptions in the form of “hashtags”, and sometimes accompanied with more profound texts. There is an option to comment posts, which makes the texts in Instagram rather heterogeneous. Therefore, Instagram, apart from being the digital tool for exchanging information (mostly photographs and opinions about them), but also the communicative platform for its users. One should not underestimate the influence of this resource on the audience.
Together with forming the virtual world image, including linguistic world image, reflecting life in Instagram with its specificity and peculiarities, the linguistic identities of users are also affected and often changed. In this research, in accordance with socio-cultural theory, we will denote linguistic identity as the identity manifesting itself in the language and via the language. In the context of Instagram use, the linguistic identity is the communicating personality with all peculiarities of its verbal behaviour. Linguistic identity presupposes the ability of the Instagram users to conduct various types of linguistic activity and perform various communicative roles in the process of their social interaction. The characteristics of linguistic identity in Instagram affect the following characteristics of the texts they create: complexity (as in structure and language); precision and comprehensiveness; purpose; grammatical and lexical correctness.
Research on the use of Instagram in Saudi Arabia
With the increasing popularity that is being garnered by the social media usage these days, higher education establishments globally have started incorporating social networking sites, precisely for educational purposes. Several global Universities, especially in the Western parts of the world today are currently offering a wide variety of social networking applications to students for enabling enhanced communication, research as well as cooperation. Yet, the usage and efficiency of similar social networking applications in Universities of the Arab world has not been explored very much yet. There exists a significant gap between the Western Universities and the Universities in the Arab world, due to the considerable cultural and academic gap that is present amidst these.
The use of social media in the academic context has been studied by number of researchers. A study conducted by Krishnamurthy and Ashwath in the year 2010 for understanding the impact social media has upon library services concluded that library users current are using social networking sites more as professional resources, rather than just networking platforms.
Likewise, another survey conducted in the year 2008 by Reuben across 148 educational institutions concluded that all the institutions that were part of the survey use social media platforms for various professional purposes like for instance, recruitment, student-teacher communication as well as for marketing.
There are also a number of other studies that have stressed upon the various issues associated with the use of social media in Universities, like for example, issues related to privacy and legitimacy. Irrespective of such issues continuously being associated with the use of social media, the number of educational institutions that are using social media is gradually increasing.
Brady, Holcomb and Smith have suggested that institutions and students are discovering innovative uses for social media applications “like media sharing, tagging, visual design collaborations, file sharing, chatting, messaging and many others.” Another study that was conducted by Dickinson and Holley attributed this excessive and innovative usage to factors like better convenience, partnership and communication that social media facilitates, devoid of the presence of geographical and physical boundaries.
Using Saudi English in Social media
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is an Arab nation wherein the local language is predominantly Urdu and English is not a commonly spoken language here. Using English as a communication medium is a highly debated topic in KSA as it is loaded with a lot of political, religious, and economic implications. While the influences that globalization as well as the modernization policies have had on the region with its adoption of globalized policies, there has been a considerable increase in English usage in the region; while there also exist various processes of resistance to the language, which essentially demand the validity of the same and thus resulting in a shift in the language to suit the local culture, beliefs as well as practices.
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