Assignment 2: Computer Mediated Communication (CMC)

Assalamualaikum! :)

For the second task, our assignment is divided into two parts. The first part is analyzing a research paper conducted by other researcher on Computer Mediated Communication, (CMC). Our group decided to choose the article of "Oral Computer-mediated Interaction Between L2 Learners: It's About Time!" by Inigo Yanguas. While studying the paper thoroughly, we jotted down important things such as research objectives, research questions, significant and purpose of study, sampling, methodology and research findings. To conclude part one, one of our group members presented the aforementioned aspects briefly to the whole class and comment on the findings in the article as well as linking it to our second presentation.

Click here for original article.

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Meanwhile, for the second part, the topic of "Gender" is chosen as a subtopic in Sociolinguistics. The framework of language features used by different gender were analyze in the corpus  of synchronous Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) of Skype. In this research, we seek to find whether there are any differences or similarities between man and woman's language used in the medium of Skype. We also keen to find out any contradiction in the findings of language features in this research and the previous one.

So we gathered three people to conduct a real time Skype chat. This is synchronous in nature. Based on the data of their conversation (corpus), we examined specific linguistic features used by different gender such as, vocabularies, complaints, topic of conversation, tag questions, hedges and curse words as well as abbreviations. All of the findings are later tabulated accordingly in our paper work. Link to our presentation slides and paperwork.

All in all, although the findings are not very concrete and strong due to limited number of participants, we found a few similarities and differences in the language used by man and woman. We also figured out the use of Skype (CMC) is actually influencing the result of our findings. Thus, this proves that Skype can be used as a medium of research in CMC field in relation to language research.