engleski

Correlation between Netspeak elements and asynchronous discussion

Asynchronous discussion can take place no matter how distant the collocutors are and therefore is playing a very important role of any e-learning system. Online discussion allows students to consider and examine other people’s thoughts and opinions on a specific topic and answer them in a concise and logical way. Within the ICT course taught in a first semester at Zagreb School of Economics and Management, we use two types of online discussion, so called opened and closed discussions. Opened discussions represent every day, informal communication between the students and the professors ; while the closed ones are related strictly to the course topics. In this paper we will analyze the use of some particular elements of language in closed discussion on two levels: professor – student and student – student. Netspeak is a new language of information communication found on Internet in a form of chat, text messages and msn. It is rapidly developed, more direct, natural and for its features is close to a spoken language. Analyzed parts of the Netspeak in this paper are those the most subjected to changes, as for Croatian language those are the omission of diacritical marks, increasing use of acronyms and abbreviations, prolongation of graphemes, the use of uppercase when lower cases are required and the introduction of signs meaning actual state of mind or mood, so called emoticons. We expected the discussion between students and professors to be formal, highly respecting the norms of the written Croatian language and the discussion between students to be less formal, more near to the Netspeak. As well we wanted to see whether there are some relations among students using Netspeak, Discussion Quality, Dominant Members and Discussion Moderators.

online discussion ; Netspeak ; e-learning ; Information and Communication Technologies ; education ;

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