The online world has become a new territory for the exploration of language acquisition and development. In their book, Barton and Lee aim at two types of audiences: linguists and social scientists interested in language as situated practice. The authors examine language users’ dynamic participation in online activity and computer-mediated discourse and examine central concepts such as language choice, identity, stance, multimodality, multilingualism, and discourses of language learning.
This book explores multilingual speakers who use instant messaging (IM), Flickr, and Facebook. Across spaces, users may take on multiple identities of who they are and how they wish to be seen online. The book highlights how users, in terms of metalinguistic awareness, can adopt either language learner or language teacher identities when they provide explanations, translations, or comments. The authors’ work indicates that language improvement is achieved through active participation in online spaces and social networks, and users may develop vernacular practices online together with more socially shared practices offline.
Barton and Lee propose mixed methods to research language learning online: multiple case studies through interviews, collection of chat logs, surveys, and techno-biographies; the use of methods that draw on online technologies is particularly encouraged. They argue that researchers interested in online practices and learning should become inside users of the tools of the communities under scrutiny, and their research methods should embrace online instruments such as online interviewing and online surveys. Although the book does not offer sophisticated explanations in terms of the participating users’ acquisition of language as a system, readers will find careful representations of online language as social practice based on perceptions and observations.
IM, Flickr, and Facebook—as well as other online spaces—are under constant evolution, and therefore they had already changed at the time of publication, but the study undertaken by Barton and Lee may still be seen as an invitation to explore online language through research methods from a variety of disciplines and carried out both on- and offline.
