Assignment 2: Computer Mediated Communication CMC

Assalamualaikum and greetings dear readers,

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Now we would like to share with you our second assignment for this particular course (brace yourself, this is going to be a long one!). If the first assignment was all pertaining to Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) in which we looked into how computer was used as important tool in teaching and learning process, the second phase of this course revolves around computer in relation to language use particularly as a means of communication or also known as Computer Mediated Communication (CMC).

In evaluating our understanding on CMC, we were assigned with two tasks. The first required us to provide a brief summary of a CMC-related research article while the second required us to conduct a mini research on the theme of our group which is Discourse Analaysis. You may find our assignments attached to this entry.

Part 1: Summary of a research article related to CMC.

This particular part was assigned to us so as to provide an overview of CMC. CMC is a very wide field and a researcher may want to embark on so many modes of communication; synchronous or asynchronous, or a combination of both. With the advent of a plethora of social network sites and computer applications, the possibility now is nonetheless limitless. In fact this part of the assignment acted as a trailblazer for the next part of the assignment that required our rigorous analytical scrutiny.

The article can be retrieved here: http://cscanada.net/index.php/sll/article/view/j.sll.1923156320120503.801

Herewith the documents of the assignment for your reference:

Part 2: Mini research related to CMC.

For this part we chose to conduct a mini research on Gricean Maxims of Conversation. Since this particular concept was highly regarded in our process of learning Discourse Analysis, we were interested to see how this could actually be translated in a virtual communication. We were curious to know how these maxims would be applied in a virtual communication that is indubitably different to that of face-to-face.

Herewith the documents of the assignment for your reference:

 

Click here to access the summary and here to the mini research proposal.

As a whole, we must admit that we have learnt a great deal from the experience of doing these two tasks. Note that we also found new insightful findings regarding discourse and language in the virtual realm. In the next post, we shall provide you with the reflection as we underwent the process of completing these tasks. We hope that you will find this entry beneficial though we humbly believe that there are many rooms for improvement. See you again, salam! 

WW