Chatiquette

Just as in real life, there are some things that you do and some things that you don't do in chatting. If you are relatively new to chatting, reading the following will help you understand the unwritten rules or “etiquette” of chat and help you to communicate with others.

Don't talk in CAPITAL LETTERS. In a chatroom, using a lot of CAPITALS or UPPER CASE is seen as shouting. Many people find it annoying when a user types entirely in capitals.

Don't join a chatroom and then leave without saying something. It is considered impolite to enter a chatroom and then leave without saying something.

Don't idle or lurk in a chatroom. When you are in a chatroom, do take part in the conversation. If you are going to be away from your computer for a short time, tell the other users. If you are a beginner, be polite and say something like, “I am new to chatting. Can I watch quietly for a few minutes? ”

Be patient. Try to be patient and wait if a user is slow to respond to you during a conversation. Remember that this is a person and they may have other things to do at the same time.

Don't use excessive colors. In some chatrooms it could be considered a flood and you might be kicked out.

In smaller chatrooms, ask if you are welcome. When you enter a chatroom that has only a few users, ask if it is a private chatroom, and if you are welcome there.

Be friendly. Be polite. Be considerate. Remember that these are real people you are chatting with. They may have different opinions to you and come from very different cultures. Treat them properly and respect their opinions, and they will treat you the same.

APPENDIX G

If they won't write, get them to text. Hamish norbrook gets predictive about the learning opportunities presented by mobile phones

The British press recently reported on a teacher in the west of Scotland who, as teachers traditionally do, asked her class to write an essay on “What I did in my holidays”. One 13-year-old schoolgirl, as pupils who want to pass exams should not do, submitted her essay in text - the shorthand used when communicating by short messaging service (SMS). The essay began “My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we usd 2 go 2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :-@ kds FTP”.

Or, as eventually interpreted by her teacher, “My summer holidays were a complete waste of time. Before, we used to go to New York to see my brother, his girlfriend and their three screaming kids face to face”. Forget the resulting uproar about falling literacy standards; texting is here to stay. So how can teachers of English use it? Texting has some clear benefits. It is the language of the street and the class. But its very modernity may cause problems for pupils who don't have English as their first language.

Some of the features of texting can be learned: abbreviations such as “CWOT” for complete waste of time and “bro” for brother. Smileys, or emoticons, have been around for a long time: the simplest ones, such as :-), can indicate in a tense-sounding email or text message that you are not feeling as angry as you may appear. Some, however, are language- or culture-specific.

The essay continued that the girl's parents took her to the north of Scotland. She disapproved. Up north, she says, there is “0 bt baas”. Nothing but sheep. Here, extra-linguistic contextual information would aid comprehension, hi English, sheep go “Baaa”. French sheep, for reasons linguistic or agricultural, go “Bee”. And while the ideograph for mountain may be clear, the disapproval of a 13-year-old would be more eloquently expressed.

So do you, as a teacher, have to master the intricacies of emoticons, onomatopoeic utterances and pictograms?

Well, thanks to a few simple algorithms and the development of predictive texting, you don't. Each numeric key from two to nine has three or four letters associated with it: 2abc, 3def, 4ghi, 5jkl, 6mno, 7pqrs, 8tuv, 9wxyz. The system predicts on a frequency basis the likely sequence of letters. To write “dog”, for example, you would press the 3def key once and get an “e”, because that is the most frequently used letter of the three. But, when you press the 6mno key the word changes to “do” automatically, and finally to “dog” with a single press on the 3def key.

Text messages offer opportunities for the English teacher because they provide a realistic basis for writing exercises. Fewer and fewer letters are being written - especially informal ones. Yet writing is as relevant as ever - and increasingly the ability to recognise a variety of different registers, formal or informal, serious or light, is essential. Often the exercise need not be a long one. So, instead of saying “Write a letter”, say “Write a text”. With predictive texting the language can be as formal as you like - and although current text messages have space for only 160 characters, with a multimedia messaging service (MMS) you can write far more.

There are also several other highly imaginative ways of bringing text into your class. Remember the craze for haikus and mini-sagas, which also struck a chord with teachers searching for imaginative yet short written practice? A project in Leeds, in the north of England, is using text messages to write the biography of a city (www. citypoems. co. uk). Meanwhile the new generation phones have a variety of features that can be used for teaching purposes. Positioning, for example. The TV series 24 showed heroes and villains chasing each other with the use of satellite-positioning systems. Your phone or PDA (personal digital assistant - like a phone but with a much bigger screen) tells others where you are. In a supermarket - more mundanely - you can receive information about special offers on fruit and vegetables as you wander by. A chance to practise the language of buying and selling language. Alerts tell you when something is happening. Writing them provides good practice in making requests and suggestions.

What does the future of texting hold? The answer is ever smaller phones that can do more and more. After the first generation of analog phones, most users now have a second-generation digital GSM (Global System for Mobile telecommunications) phone. Third generation (3G) phones will be along shortly, but meanwhile there's an intermediate, 2. 5G, that will, among other things, record video clips. A couple of other acronyms. WAP - wireless application protocol – helps access the Internet over mobile phones, taking into account factors such as small screen size. And, in Japan, i-mode phones provide a wide range of services, including English language teaching.

The educational use of mobile phones can be experienced by learners in many parts of the world, including Britain. BBC Wales has launched a free service (i. e. you pay only for the text message) for teaching Welsh. So I now know that if I say Unwaith eto, yn arath, os gwelwch chin dda, somebody will repeat what they've said, slowly. You can get details from the BBC Wales website (www. bbc. co. uk/wales/learnwelsh/). Linking mobile with Web seems sensible, given current cost and function factors associated with mobiles. The BBC has launched a project in China using text message alerts to take users to a website with audio. The BBC is also using SMS in areas you might not expect – such as West Africa. The digital divide may exist when it comes to computers, but in countries such as Benin mobiles are common, and sending a text is far cheaper than a letter.

(Guardian Weekly // Thursday May 15, 2003.)

APPENDIX H