Young Bilinguals' Language Behaviour in Social Networking Sites: The Use of Welsh on Facebook

The effect of out-of-school media contact on language attitudes in multilingual adolescents: a complex psychosociolinguistic system

“…While it cannot be denied that English dominates current audio-visual and digital media, out-of-school exposure must logically affect attitudes to other languages. In fact, this has been observed with Russian (Thorne, 2008), Chinese (Thorne & Black, 2011), and Welsh (Cunliffe, Morris & Prys, 2013) and must also stand true for many, if not all, others. Bearing all of the above in mind, we can now tentatively present a psychosociolinguistic complexity model of multilingualism (figure 11).…”

“…This is explored in terms of identity (Thorne et al, 2009;Thorne & Black, 2011), virtual communities (Lin & Warschauer, 2011), affinity spaces (Gee, 2005), translanguaging practices (Paolillo, 2011;Androutsopoulos, 2012), and language attitudes (Cunliffe, Morris & Prys, 2013). The chapter also explores online videogames in terms of language learning arenas (Peterson, 2010a(Peterson, , 2010b, affective factors (Ranalli, 2008;Reinders & Wattana, 2010), intercultural communication and language use as a social action (Thorne, 2008), and motivation through control, agency, and self-affirming activities (Gee, 2007;Henry, 2013).…”

“…As Thorne and Black (2011) some examples of an intersection between language socialization and out-of-school factors in terms of social networking (Harrison & Thomas, 2009;Mitchell, 2012;Cunliffe, Morris & Prys, 2013), and online games (Thorne, 2008). We can suggest a nexus then in that immediate environmental out-of-school factors socialize by inculcating beliefs, values and behaviours that are in line with the surrounding society, traditional media out-of-school factors provide the raw 'trans-border' materials for the creation of affinity spaces and the projection into imagined communities, finally, new media out-of-school factors actually are the loci (the affinity spaces and virtual communities) where the processes of socialization (i.e.…”

“…Language learning in this way integrates new literacy skills with the negotiation of identity along with cognitive and social processes, but more importantly it promotes autonomy and gives control over the learning environment (Harrison & Thomas, 2009). The fact that social networking platforms create spaces for minority languages can affect attitudes towards those languages (Cunliffe, Morris & Prys, 2013) and encourage users to take part in communities where both their knowledge of the minority language and their multilingual competence is valued (Caulfield, 2013).…”

“…However, while a great deal of focus has been placed on language acquisition and language learning in traditional learning environments, less attention has been paid to extramural contact with authentic materials and situations, and there is scarce existing work which explicitly attempts to link media contact with language attitudes (see: Mettewie & Janssens, 2007;Enever, 2011;Cunliffe, Morris & Prys, 2013-in Europe, and: Nightingale, 2012. As Jessner (2013) points out, it is crucial to consider 'forms of learning' in multilingual development, the current study extends this notion by exploring forms of input and the impact they have on the affective domain.…”