Tutor Marked Assignment (TMA01)- Part 2

Hello everybody,

As Bo stated, I have also enjoyed thinking about my personal experience with communicative repertoire for this assignment. It made me realise how different my language has become over the years and how it varies depending on who I am around. For example, when I am at home with my fiance, I am more relaxed and don’t often use any utterances. I tend to use back-channeling such as laughter and ‘mmm-hm’ with her when she is speaking so I can show my interest in what she is saying.

When I was at school, I also used fillers such as ‘like’ frequently and would get told off by teachers. As Seargeant, Giaxoglou, Paterson and Tagg (2018 a pp40) explain, ‘schoolchildren are a common target for complaints about language’ and I feel as if I often do this with my own partner. She is a very intelligent woman, but her language skills are limited, so I often have to correct her and she asks me to check her spelling and grammar for work projects. As she works in digital marketing, I get to experience a ‘context collapse’ when helping her.

As stated in Unit 2 (Seargeant, Giaxoglou, Paterson and Tagg, 2018 b), social relationships shape the way we use language. I believe that because me and my partner are of a similar age and social class, our language is quite similar, yet I realised that, when my interlocutor is my Grandmother, my language use becomes much more respectful, I pronounce all of my ‘T’s’ and do not use profanity, and I use convergence language towards whatever she says, whether slightly racist or not.

Due to being a teenager in the height of technology, I also use social media on a day to day basis. I am currently running a Literary blog where I post my university work, my writing exercises and some discussions about trending topics. With the blog, I use what I class as ‘highly educated’ language for my discussions, but in my personal stories and writing, I believe my tone and style changes depending on the genre of the story. You can see more of my personality in the stories, which is what I also think I do on social media. I use a vast variety of emojis, the dog paw print one being my most used at this time, and I use a lot of visual and audio modes.

I believe Bo’s common usage of ‘Ur’ is definitely a generation marker, as my mother still texts using these abbreviations. I believe it comes from the early technology advance, where ‘Nokia’ phones were the new, and you had to press a button up to 3 times to get one letter. Nowadays, children as young as 7, can type full sentences due to the easy access and style of a modern smartphone keyboard. I am old enough that I had one of these Nokia phones, but young enough that I couldn't live without tik tok right now.

Maison (Maisie)

Word Count: 500

References:

A: Seargeant, P., Giaxoglou, K., Paterson, L. and Tagg, C., 2018. L101 Book 1: What is Language?. Glasgow: The Open University, pp.40

B: Seargeant, P., Giaxoglou, K., Paterson, L. and Tagg, C., 2018. L101 Book 1: What is Language?. Glasgow: The Open University, pp.21-23