Blogging Mania
I had been trying to maintain a blog for many years but failed miserably on both accounts. When I found out I had to start blogging as part of my Language and ICT course, I realized this may just be an opportunity for me to make this blog work. I used to have loads of fun jazzing up my blogs way before I actually start posting anything. However with this new blogger that moved out of Beta, I'm getting terribly stressed out whenever I try to customize my blog skin because some error stating that my xml is not well parsed and closed. Being a computer dumb dumb, I couldn't understand what it meant and still don't in fact. I understand the use of html up to a certain level and I must thank blogging for that. I learned about the joys of messing around with html to make a page look funky.

There are several pros and cons of using blogger. I found it to be a place where we can express our feelings freely for the world to read. Our literacy skills are put to the test and we can improve our use of language online because knowing that many people will have access to reading our material, it makes us more self-conscious about how our written english will translate onto the screen. Some of the cons about blogging is that not all thoughts that are expressed online can be accepted by everybody. Sometimes racial and political issues arise and this causes conflicts and misunderstandings. Another con would be that even though blogging may be an arena whereby we can improve our english language, many still abuse this by using manglish and any other form of a mashed up language.

The introduction of blogging has made this course worth looking forward to. It's exciting to post assignments online and we get marks to jazz up out blogs. Could anything possibly get better than this? I really enjoy blogging now and if I can actually have the time and (god-willing) a strong internet access, I'll definately continue this blogging experience outside of this course requirement!

Beyond Concordance Lines: Using Concordance to Investigate Language Development
In this article it states the language corpus has commonly been used as the basis of dictionaries and teaching materials whereby it is enhanced by the availability of concordance software such as Wordsmith, MonoConc Pro and Microconcord. Teachers, researches and even language learners typically examine concordance lines to discover how words and grammatical constructions are used. New software such as RANGE, developed by practitioners in linguistics has provided an additional perspective to corpus studies.

One of the more recent effort is the English of Malaysian school students or EMAS corpus by researches from UPM. The EMAS corpus is an untagged and unedited learner corpus that contains written data in the form of three essays written by 800 students. All students who contributed to the corpus were considered as being above average in English language proficiency. The major criterion in selecting the topics for the essays was the amount of language the topics could elicit. Additionally, other corpus initiatives such as the National Science Foundation project also use a similar pictorial or visual prompt.

Numerous language acquisition studies focus on specific target structures and examine the acquisition of these structures over a period f time. The developmental patterns are examined by studying the language productivity as well as vocabulary use of the students. The study examines language development by comparing the performance of the three age groups with regards their language productivity and vocabulary use.

Productivity in this article is indicated by the number of sentences per essay and the words per sentence. A chi-square analysis reveals a significant increase in the number of sentences per essay according to the respondents (x² = 10.03, p <0.05). The diversity of the vocabulary used in corpus is often determined by calculating the type to token ratio. Number of separation words (type) ____________________________ x 100 Number of words in a text (token) A higher type to token ratio suggests that the learners are using many uncommon words whereas lower ratios indicate an over-reliance on a limited set of words. The sophistication of the vocabulary can be determined by using specialized software such as RANGE, a vocabulary analysis program which analyses text by comparing it to several base lists of frequently used words. In conclusion, this article has attempted to present the relevance of corpus data in investigating language development without having to analyze concordance lines The values in this study, therefore, can be regarded as benchmarks against which to compare future groups of students as well as access the development of the language program in Malaysia in general.

The Similarities and Differences between sms, email and chat.
SMS, email and chat are modes of communication in the digital era. They have their own similarities and differences in terms of language. First of all SMS is short for Short Messaging System. Mode of communication uses a cell phone. Text are based on short messages sent via a network. Emails on the other hand are electronic mails sent via the internet, it is a form of asynchronous messages whereby the mails are read and replied at a delayed time. Chats are a form of synchronous messaging in which messages are sent and received in real time. The similarities between these three forms of communication are colloquial, code switching and simplicity. The differences are formality, asynchronous/synchronous and .

Lets look at the first similarity between these three modes of communication which is simplicity. Frankly anyone from any walk of life can use the three communications methods to keep in touch. However, the younger generation is capable of catching up with the times and are more technology savvy than the older generation. Using email is a more popular short version of a letter used by the older and younger people to communicate for business or pleasure. When it comes to chat and sms' the younger people hold top reign as they have nimble fingers to type astonishingly fast and surprisingly accurate. Sms is a convenient way to send simple and short messages in an instant to people in order to stay connected hence why its the most simple mode of communication.

Another similarity is the colloquial use of language. Younger people especially teenagers have somewhat invented a new form of 'language' if that's what we can call it by shortening words to form short hand in order to make messaging simple. For an example 'ttyl', 'brb' and 'lol' are short form of full words which actually stand for 'talk to you later', 'be right back' and 'laugh out loud'. These short forms are usually used in chat and sms'. This makes the communication process faster and simpler.

The next similarity is code switching. The language used in emails, chat and sms are not entirely in English. Sometimes people tend to mix the language especially in Malaysia. The manglish language is used profusely throughout the internet and even in day to day speaking. This transforms into writing and thus you get mixed languages when you are reading. For an example in a message 'u n i nak gi makan' the language mixes english and malay and also it uses short forms.

The first difference is formality. In emails, the language is more formal compared to chats and sms. It's more longer with a more proper usage of English that also has a signature at the bottom. In sms and chats, the language is informal because it is sent to close acquaintances and they are not the kind to be particular about language. Besides that sms' are very short and people try to utilize the characters and minimise the length of messages sent by shortening everything thus it makes the language informal.

The next difference is the asynchronous and synchronous form. Emails are asynchronous because it is conducted on delayed time. Replies are not instantaneous. Whereas chats and sms are synchronous because it is done in real time. Messages are sent and received instantaneously. People can have a conversation via the internet and also through the handphone without having to speak.

In conclusion, there are evident similarities and differences between emails, chats and sms. Yet, they are still the most awesome form of communication. thank you!

Welcome!
Hello! I can't say this is my first time blogging because I had started blogging somewhere in 2004. Well it was more of repeated failed attempts to maintain the blog. However, it's a brand new year and (hopefully) a brand new ME so I'm sticking to my resolution to maintain this blog site! Then again, it's actually part of my Language and ICT course, so how far can I run without blogging really right? Hehe..I hope that reading my blog will be entertaining (and not boring!) to you readers out there and also to my lecturer Dr.Premela.