Computer‐mediated communication (CMC) users writing in Arabic often represent Arabic in ‘ASCII‐ized’ form, using the Latin alphabet rather than the Arabic alphabet normally used in other contexts (Warschauer, El Said, & Zohry, 2002). Analyzing ASCII‐ized Arabic (AA) can give insights into ways in which CMC is shaped by linguistic, technological and social factors. This paper presents a study of AA as used among female university students in the United Arab Emirates, drawing on data from a small corpus of instant messenger (IM) conversations, and from an e‐mail survey of users' experience with this form of writing. The AA in the conversations was found to show influences from computer character sets, from different varieties of spoken Arabic, from Arabic script, from English orthography and from other latinized forms of Arabic used in contexts which pre‐date CMC. Users have developed creative (but variable) solutions to the constraints involved, but the purposes of AA use also extend for social reasons to situations where technical constraints do not apply.
In this article, I discuss how the administrators and local teachers in a Turkish university English language centre perceive others in the institution. I present interview data to illustrate processes of Othering, whereby a group constructs a shared, Us-Them representation of another group. The data show that administrators and local teachers view students and each other in terms of difference from themselves. In constructing such representations, they draw on local and wider discourses about learning, social order, national and institutional characteristics, class, and gender. Interrogating biases and developing a deeper understanding of Othering in TESOL contexts can help English language educators to develop appropriate and authentic pedagogies and curricula for local contexts in an increasingly globalized world.
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