My post title is a reference to Michel Foucault's concept of the technologies of the self about which I attended a seminar when I was still in Media Studies back in Germany. To put it very simply, the concept tries to describe the ways in which people put forward, and police, their "selves" in society; and the ways in which they are enabled or constrained in their use of different techniques by available discourses. Although this might seem a little off-course with regards to foreign language teaching I had to think about it again while reading about computer-mediated communication in FL teaching.
I would be interested in analyzing to what extent a CMC environment enables students to put forward a different self and possibly a different L2 output. Do they use a different language in a chat environment e.g. as compared to face-to-face interaction? To what extend may such a different language output be at odds with skills we as teachers want our students to have? A problem with this approach might be that CMC in a classroom environment is structured by certain goals or tasks and is not really representative of real chat behaviour...In this respect then it is the technology of the learning oriented classroom setting that influences the chat language output more than the medium itself...So, basically I'm not really sure how to tackle these thoughts productively.(comments and suggestions highly appreciated)
2 comments:
This is a very interesting topic. One of my classmates at ECU did a project on how virtual identity is displayed and perceived in a on-line context. Since people can conceal their gender, ethnicity and age, how can the interlocutors implement these things. Well, Josh found that participants of an on-line community used the avatars and writing style to project a certain identity and that these quees were relevant for the audience.
Here is the link to Josh Iorio's webstite:
http://personal.ecu.edu/iorioj/work.htm
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