11C - Reading Practice LANGUAGE LEARNING
Read the following text about language and answer the 15 questions on the next page.
Will we ever stop speaking and just text?
Paragraph 1
Say this out loud: “omg wtfffffff r u ok???!!!!1111 lololol”. Well, OK, you can’t. And yet, in its loosely structured live interactivity, internet slang like that is closer to speech than text. But it has its own conventions, some of which defy saying out loud. It’s a substitute for speech. Could it replace spoken English one day? That may sound like putting the cart before the horse. Speech is what we learn first (except for those of us who are unable to speak or hear). Throughout history, many people have never learned to write, and many cultures have had no writing system, but they have all had spoken language. Written language was created to give a record of spoken language – speaking seems somehow more natural than writing.
Paragraph 2
Not that written language is just the frozen form of speech. Over the centuries, it has gained features such as exclamation marks and italics to convey spoken features such as tone, but it has also evolved to convey things that speech doesn’t: the etymological traces carried by our spelling (much to the chagrin of many people learning English as a second language today), the structure of thought conveyed by paragraphs, the aesthetics of fonts and other design elements. Some features of written language feed back into speech, such as saying “slash” in phrases like “my housemate/boyfriend,” but speech and text have grown apart and evolved into many different types for different purposes. In some languages, such as Arabic, the standard written and spoken forms have diverged so much they’re different dialects.
Paragraph 3
Live internet vernacular English (let’s call it Live for short) got its real start in the 1990s. Usenet chat groups were sometimes interacting in real time and sometimes responding later. This immediate, informal environment fostered a more relaxed use of English. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and instant messaging used text and left a record but were mainly intended to be real-time or very close to it. Because they were a new context and style of use, people played around to discover potentials and to innovate. An early and striking example was a performance of Hamnet, a satirical version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet done in 1993 entirely in IRC, in which Ophelia says the following to Hamlet: “Hehehehehe ;-D”.
Paragraph 4
That ;-D shows one of the first things that emerged for computer-mediated communication to mimic speech: representations of facial expressions and other physical gestures – emoticons and, more recently, emoji. Emoticons and emoji represent aspects of live communication, but they’re not always used in the same way as what they represent. Several studies have found that their primary use is not to present the speaker’s emotion but to help smooth out interpersonal relationships and to convey features such as irony. They are not about how the sender feels so much as how the sender wants the receiver to feel. As linguist David Crystal writes in Language and the Internet, emoticons often serve “as a warning to the recipient(s) that the sender is worried about the effect a sentence might have”. They can soften messages that might make the recipient look bad and strengthen ones that make the recipient look good.
Paragraph 5
Live is affecting other forms of English, spoken and written, because we borrow from it and refer to it. Some Live is just not sayable, but you can hear people say, “L O L” and you can see emoji in ads. Is it slipping into formal writing by younger people as they grow up using it and become adults? Studies have shown that it’s not. They learn how to write like grown-ups when they have to, just as we all have: we don’t use the slang we learned as kids in our annual reports. And we’ve had abbreviations such as FYI (for your information) since long before the internet, but you won’t see them in newspaper articles or academic essays. What we might get as the medium matures is more formal versions of Live. Conventions already exist for certain kinds of formal discourse on Twitter, such as numbered tweet threads. But that will just be one more variety of English among many.
Questions 1-5 (one mark per question)
The text on the previous page has five paragraphs (1-5). Choose the best title for each paragraph from A-F below and write the letter (A-F) on the lines below. There is one title you don’t need.
A Some things speech cannot do.
B The primacy of speech.
C How to write on the internet.
D The future of Live.
E The evolution of a new form of communication.
F Why we use some features of internet speak.
- Paragraph 1 …………………
- Paragraph 2 …………………
- Paragraph 3 …………………
- Paragraph 4 …………………
- Paragraph 5 …………………
Questions 6-13 (one mark per question)
Decide if the following statements are TRUE or FALSE and write a short justification using evidence from the text.
A Emoticons are effective at revealing the speaker’s feelings.
B There are no norms about the usage of Live online.
C Text reveals things about the history of words that speech doesn’t.
D Research shows that Live has a negative effect on other types of writing.
E Expressions like “omg” resemble speech more than text.
F Emoticons change how we interpret messages.
G The speedy nature of early internet chat encouraged novel forms of communication.
H We use some written conventions in our speech.
D Research shows that Live has a negative effect on other types of writing.
E Expressions like “omg” resemble speech more than text.
F Emoticons change how we interpret messages.
G The speedy nature of early internet chat encouraged novel forms of communication.
H We use some written conventions in our speech.
Questions 14-18 (one mark per question)
Complete sentences 14-18 with a word, phrase or number from the text (maximum three words). Write the word, phrase or number in the space provided.
14. All civilisations in history have used speech, but not all have developed a …………………………………………………
15. The spoken and written forms of certain languages have split to such a degree that they have become …………………………………………………
16. In the early 90s, a play was performed ………………………………………………… , using Live.
17. Emoticons were one of the early features that allowed ………………………………………………… to imitate the spoken word.
18. ………………………………………………… like OTOH, meaning “on the other hand”, have always been used, so the internet has changed little in that respect.