زبان انگلیسی  : اصول یادگیری تدریس ترجمه

If human behaviors were computer programs, human language would be the killer app. And if fundamental shifts in language usage are always linked to significant advances in human culture, historians millennia from now might well look back on the present time as one of the most vital in the history of humankind.

A number of scholars today, in fact, would argue that three seminal events provide the framework for studying language and its effects on culture: first, the development of speech beginning at least 40,000 years ago (some scientists would say tens of thousands of years earlier); second, the development of writing beginning about 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia; and, third, the development of digital communication via the World Wide Web beginning in the closing decade of the 20th century.

Calling the language used on the Internet "a new mode," Dr. Dieter Stein says there has been nothing like what is now happening "since the development of writing."

"What we are seeing is a new medium," says Stein, who in a recent telephone interview from his home in Germany talked about his work at Heinrich-Heine-Universitaet, Duesseldorf, where he is overseeing an ambitious linguistic analysis of the phenomenon. This new mode of language "will carry traces of spokenness and writtenness, but it'll be something new," Stein says. "This is what we are seeing evolving. This is what I am looking at in vitro right now, and it is really kind of misguided to say, Is it more like spoken or is it more like written [language]? It is a new entity in its own right."

"It is this, the arrival of a third medium of communication, that makes it a genuine linguistic revolution," says Dr. David Crystal, who is writing a book on the subject. In his Language and the Internet, slated for publication later this year by Cambridge University Press, Crystal plans to outline the evidence for a linguistic hybrid, "something that is neither speech nor writing, but a very curious amalgam of the two," and in a recent telephone interview from his home in Holyhead, Wales, Crystal described that evidence as "quite compelling."

Why then should words challenge Eternity,
When greatest men, and greatest actions die?
Use may revive the obsoletest words,
And banish those that now are most in vogue;
Use is the judge, the law, and rule of speech.
-- Horace, Ars Poetica

The idea that the Internet utilizes a new mode of language is certainly not new, but researchers like Crystal and Stein are just now beginning to dissect interactions on the Net to gain insight into the nature of digital language.

Crystal is probing each of the Internet's "genres" (that is, the distinct methods people use to communicate via Web pages: e-mail, asynchronous discussion forums such as mailing lists, synchronous chat such as instant messaging, and virtual reality worlds such as MUDs or multiuser dungeons), and his book will be a comprehensive summary detailing the components of this new medium.

For example, traditional writing is static while the language of Web pages, Crystal says, "is dynamic in a way that written language is not ... The Web allows us to see written language that changes in front of us while we are watching it. You can see the words dance across the screen, change color, change size, and do all sorts of things that we've never seen before."

E-mail, presently the most widely used interactive type of Internet communication, is characterized by what Crystal calls "framing," which is among the features of digital language unlike anything else in language usage. "It's extraordinary," Crystal explains, "that I can take your message, leave out the first bit, add something to the second bit and, generally speaking, use your message as a frame for my reply. That is the most distinctive feature of e-mail."

In discussion forums, the fact that a thread can be set down and then later picked up adds a dimension to communication that Crystal says writing has never been able to accomplish: Any idea a person records can be replied to "at any time, by anybody." Calling the phenomenon "elongated interactivity," he says that when somebody activates a message, "it is as if Dracula has been brought back from the grave ... There's been nothing ever like this at all in traditional writing."

For chat, the defining feature is "the simultaneity of 'voices' on the same screen." Crystal describes it as a multitude of conversations existing all on the same plane and "taking place at the same time on a variety of different topics, all intercollated, all intertwined," and he points out once again that nowhere in the worlds of speech or writing does such a forum exist.

The virtual worlds, according to Crystal, are characterized by "the sets of instructions you have to follow in order to find your way around the world to play the game ... Because it's a fantasy world, [you've] got to learn how to move around in it ... I've never seen anything quite as developed as the kind of manipulative language that you have to acquire in order to do this."

Stein and his colleagues, meanwhile, are performing what linguists call a corpus analysis of each genre to discover the inner workings of the language as it is actually being used. They have defined dozens of features--for example, deletion of a sentence's subject ("Coming on Tuesday" instead of "I am coming on Tuesday"), aberrant spellings ("mebbe" instead of "maybe"), and shifts in mechanics ("dont" instead of "don't")--and are "tagging" documents from a huge database containing samples from each of the genres.

"We want to find out what people are doing," Stein says, "in order to be able to set up norms, linguistic norms, just as we have them for the genres of spoken and written language. We want to find out what are going to be the norms for digital language."

One of the purposes of Professor Stein's study is to describe for digital communication the characteristics of its various "registers." A register is, broadly speaking, a style of usage: One would speak differently, for instance, to a classroom of first-graders than to a jury in a courtroom, and one would write differently in a personal letter than in a cover letter for a job application. There are all kinds of registers--which are delineated by specialized vocabulary, syntactic patterns, and rhetorical devices--and one of the signs of "communicative competence" is the ability to use the appropriate language demanded by whichever register a person is speaking or writing for.

"What we have always seen and what we will continue to see is the evolution of new registers," Stein says, "language adapting to new functions, developing new syntactic structures, or old syntactic structures will take on new functions."

Because, as Stein puts it, "this is in a state of flux" on the Internet, language scholars are watching the new registers unfold and take shape very close to their live environment--as if they are watching them on instant replay. And because of the power of computer technology, the rate of change is phenomenal. According to an International Data Corporation study last fall, the world's networked computers will provide a forum for the exchange of 35 billion e-mails every day by the year 2005--and even at the present time, about 10 billion e-mails are being sent day in and day out.

In fact, Stein reports the tendencies his study is uncovering as if he were microscopically viewing the replication of some new biological organism in real time. His summary of how networked computers are transforming communication: "It's quite breathtaking."

From the time of the invention of the alphabet if not before, all technologies have originated in language, but in cyberspace, we don't see or hear information so much as we feel it. Technology may at last be outstripping language, not merely leaving the nest but killing the mother.
-- Switters, in Tom Robbins's Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Being a linguist at the beginning of the 21st century must be something akin to what it was like to be a physicist at the end of World War II. Even as the proliferation of technology and its use by the masses for sharing information is becoming a global force that is forever changing the face of communication, a number of language watchers are alarmed by the changes being wrought.

"The Internet is one big vanity press," says Stephen McCabe, whose 1997 master's thesis for Aston University in England is titled "Online Wizardry: Discourse in E-mail and Mailing Lists." McCabe, who has been teaching English as a foreign language for nine years in Japan, commented from his office at Daito Bunko University.

"What I'm afraid is happening," he says, "is that the gatekeepers, if you like, have disappeared ... Language is constantly evolving: This is a given ... Who knows what will be next."

A sentiment of caution is echoed by Dr. Naomi Baron, professor of linguistics at American University in Washington, D.C. Her 2000 book Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It's Heading soon could be required reading for anyone studying the history (or speculating about the future) of writing.

"I believe that we are making ourselves into less sophisticated users of language because of computer mediated communication in general and, perhaps, e-mail in particular," she says. "Computer mediated communication, especially e-mail and instant messaging, drives us to produce writing and send it off without reflecting." Baron points up the linguist Eric Havelock's maxim that writing "makes us look at what we're thinking," but she notes "it only makes us look at what we're thinking if we pause to look."

Communication that is either virtually or nearly instantaneous has a downside--especially regarding writing conventions such as proper grammar and correct spelling--that is obvious to anyone who reads much e-mail or who has visited a few personal home pages. More importantly, there is a concern that the myriad skills required to use one's own language to greatest effect are being eroded by how it is habitually used ("misused," the gatekeepers would argue) on the Internet.

"We used to teach people how to write different styles," says Baron. "We used to teach them, when you're writing a letter to your friend, do what you please ... as long as, in addition, you know how to write for other audiences. So the question is not should we stop people from being informal in e-mail, but rather should we find a way to help ensure that there is another style that you know and that you know when to use it--and that you bring out all the armament necessary to write clearly and to edit before you send a message forth in those circumstances which call for it."

Baron argues that the Internet's effect on language is advancing forces that have been steadily influencing writing, for the worse, for the past 60 years. The three factors she focuses on--a student-centered model for learning, the aggrandizement of youth culture, and the diminishing importance of "public face"--were already at work when the World Wide Web began its dramatic effect on the Information Age. The environment created by those factors--where the education system promoted learning (and therefore writing) as a process rather than a product, where mature and traditional ways of thinking were valued less and less, and where formality and appropriateness were not high priorities--was perfect for the development of the Internet. In every aspect of the new medium, from e-mail to e-commerce, it has seemed as if everyone has been making up the rules as they went along, and those now raising a warning flag would argue that digital culture's emphasis on spontaneity and egalitarianism is driving a similar tendency toward degrading the effective use of language.

It is important to point out, however, that scholars were decrying the state of liberal education in America for decades before the advent of networked computer systems. It would be a mistake, then, to confuse this new medium of communication with the actual causes of society's troubles in valuing and promoting learning. As Professor Crystal puts it, the Internet is unquestionably influencing the quality of language usage, "but it's influence under our control ... What the Internet has done is given us another way of communicating, which we can make use of once we've mastered it."

No doubt, the role of educational and other powerful institutions will be vital to promoting the fullest use of language (in every realm, from business to literature), but the question whether those institutions will measure up to the task is separate from questions surrounding the technology itself and its use for communication. Professor Baron frames it this way: "The question is going to be ... Will there be any models presented, whether it's by people in industry or people in education, that say, 'Here are the wonderful things you can do with this technology. Let me show you how to do it,' so that that becomes a new way of doing intellectual business?"

Digital language, says Stein, "will help the spread of the new economy, the new way of doing things. The more we know about this language, the more linguists can then go on and give guidance what to do and what not to do, and we can then go on and teach it."

As developers are working on the software to run the next big thing and engineers are working on the bandwidth to share it with the masses, the individuals and institutions in charge of education, government, economics, and ethics are in a position to take the lead in doing the next right thing. Just as there was a case to be made for effective leadership to guide advances in physics specifically and science generally at midcentury, so there is now a case to be made for guiding the spread of digital communication, which seems destined to fundamentally and forever alter every activity in society, from the practice of law to the promotion of commerce.

In the beginning was the Word ...
—John 1:1

The absolute excitement linguists almost universally exude over the Internet's possible effect on language can almost make one forget that language is neither as unpredictable nor as unreliable as some "revolutionary" new product headed for market might be. Nothing makes us more fundamentally human than language, and no technology now or in the future is going to fundamentally alter the essential--almost mystical--relationship among what we do, what we think, and what we say. The difference between the changes in communication anticipated because of the Pony Express (or the telephone, television, etc.) and the changes in communication anticipated because of the Internet are differences in degree rather than in kind.

Following up on the idea that language is a stable force underpinning technological change. Internet is not changing language itself at all. He says, "We don't have people saying things like 'Our relationship crashed'... 'John, did you log out of this conversation?' ... 'Am I clicking through to you?' Why don't people say that considering how many people are using this terminology online? If I were going to say that there's a revolution in language taking place, I would say, look here's one example after another of these things that you now read in the newspapers or hear on television."

He explains that speech, sign, writing, and now computer mediated communication of every stripe are simply overlays for language itself. "A writing system," he says, "is an attempt to capture in a different medium the phonological system or, in the case of Chinese, the semantic system of language ... for storing language, essentially ... Speech is an audio means or a vocal means of employing language. You also have sign, which is a manual means."

These overlays, he says, whether they be spoken, written, or digital communication, are "something which interprets some aspect of language ... a transducer between language and the outside world." Pointing out that the underlying components of language--its grammar, vocabulary, and syntax--are not fundamentally changed by the medium through which it is interpreted, he says that the changes in language are secondary to the immense power and complexity networked computers bring to information creation and retrieval.

In its most extreme form, he says, the Internet is going to bring the interpretive overlays of language full circle and incorporate them more closely with experience itself. "What you're going to see is more graphics, more photographs, more motion pictures, more sound ... I don't think [the Internet is] revolutionary in terms of language. It's revolutionary for things around language ... There's a revolution in communication, there's a revolution in social communities, things like that."

A story he tells about the power of technology wed to language, in fact, equates the Internet with another high-tech innovation, chicken wire. He poses the question, When did the Soviet Union truly begin to disintegrate? His answer: "It began falling apart when you began to see chicken wire antennas sprouting up all around the countryside and people started picking up the satellites directly ... What they really discovered was that you could take chicken wire and you could get satellite transmissions straight out of the sky." The information beamed down to Soviet households beginning in the 1970s, He says, provided significant impetus for the fall of the old order.

Behind the story lies a point about the marriage between technology (the "tube" through which information travels) and language (the content that travels through the "tube"). And the point, of course, is that the effective simultaneous application of the two can be enormously synergistic.

Of that synergy on the Internet, He says, "The whole world becomes an encyclopedia of itself."

The main questions linguists are now asking are, first, how do the components of this grand encyclopedia actually work (more precisely, how is digital language created, transferred, stored, and referenced), and, second, what are the most effective methods for taking advantage of language as a tool for using the Internet to its fullest potential and to its best ends?