My Digital Literacies Context

EDIT NOTICE: I have significantly changed the content of this post since its original upload.

Upon further examination of the proz.com website, it did not seem to be a good fit for my interests. The forum focuses more on the day-to-day problems of a translator – which I will likely never be. The caricature form is still incredibly interesting to me, and I have heard that it is very active and informative, but my membership has not yet been approved. As I wait and hope that this will change soon, I am forced to move on. As I could not find any forums directly related to visual thinking as a strategy (despite plenty of resources), I switched my search to language once again. As I had looked through proz.com, I realized that what I was truly interested in was language itself – how it works, why it works, and how to play with it. While translations are one way to play with it, I wanted something broader. This led me to a Google search that led me to how-to-learn-any-language.com (HTLAL).

HTLAL is a website created for people who wish to teach themselves other languages. Created by Francois Micheloud, a self-described language enthusiast, the website houses several different resources that inform individuals of the options available for learning languages. The most robust and arguably most useful resource on the site is a forum where participants are encouraged to talk about how they learned another language, what languages are most valuable to learn, and how language works in general. The forum is divided into four main sections to accommodate all of these interests: Practical Language Learning, Non-English Discussion Rooms, Around Languages, and Resources. The users are identified in each post by

·         Their username

·         Their picture, if they choose to upload one

·         What level of –glot they are (monoglot, diglot, triglot, etc.)

·         Their stated home country

·         How many days ago they joined the site

·         How many posts they’ve written, and how many posts they have voted on (as to whether or not it was useful)

·         The names of the languages they know and that they are currently studying.

They vary in age and profession; while there is no way to be sure of accurate information on the web, the majority of users I have looked at seem to be at least young adults and the reasons for learning the languages have implied professions from student to translator to hobbyist to security guard. Their unifying factors are that they have agreed on English as their main language of communication on the forum and that they are interested to some degree in learning more languages/more about language. I am excited to see how such a diverse population comes together to approach language - what they consider it to be, what links they find between languages, and why they consider it important to be multilingual.

As I explore this site further, I notice that it is far more usable on the forum side than the references and resources side. Entering the website, the main page is arranged as such:

The page itself has only a few lines to fill the space while the edges are almost overcrowded with information. The links running down the right side represent links to some of the more interesting places on the site, followed by a few sponsored links. It took me a few visits not to dismiss all of them as advertisements, as I usually expect random images with links underneath (especially in such a location, so cut off from the rest of the information on the page) to be just that.

The information on this side of the website is very interesting – Francois Micheloud (the creator of the website) has written about the multiple-language learning process in great detail, from his own success story to tips and tricks on learning a language, to profiles of the languages themselves. Though he does not cite other experts, he does generally qualify his statements as being true in his experience, and asks others to write in with their own experiences to broaden the scope of the site. Though this exhortation is repeated in several areas, there is very little evidence of his audience actually writing to him. These sections include links to all sorts of valuable language-learning tools, from flashcard blanks to foreign-language radio stations to some of the better language-learning materials currently available; unfortunately, some of the links have broken since Micheloud’s last update of this side of the site in 2009. There is also a section with audio recordings of the various languages, but I cannot find a way to it through the site’s architecture – I have to rely on Google to reach that particular page of the site.

When I looked at this site initially, I made a beeline for the forums; their main page looks like this:

I started getting to the site through this page; it took several visits to realize that there was no direct route back to the other side of the site – no home button, an icon in the upper-left-hand corner that acts clickable but does nothing. I finally realized that I could click on the “About” link in the top menu, and that page would have a button directing me back home; I quickly figured out what the web address was at that point in order to reach that side more expeditiously (though I didn’t use it much – the forums have so much interesting information that it can be hard to remember the static, one-sided information on the rest of the site).

What will be analyzed

As stated above, the forums are the most vibrant, active section of the site. There is simply no reason to miss the rest of the site, and so I do not. As the forums see so much activity (174,000 posts and 12,000 site members currently), it is easy to find an active thread to look at. In a few random searches of the forum, the thread analyzed in my first data sample was one of the most interesting threads I found – curious in content and fairly robust in posting history.

I hope to participate as a potential language learner - I can't think of many if any professions where it is not an asset to know more than one language; being multilingual can be especially helpful in the classroom or in speech-language pathology. I know a smattering of several other languages and would be interested in seeing how these particular languages are viewed, used, and learned on the forum. EDIT: while I signed up as a member and still hope to use this site more as a learner in the future, I found that being an observer seemed to work for this particular analysis.

Language is a vital part of culture; Knoblauch calls it one of the most important aspects thereof. It is constantly changing as people learn to communicate in their own little groups, bridge language barriers, and bridge technological barriers. This forum purports to discuss many tips and tricks people have learned to cope with learning to bridge one kind of communication barrier and therefore should be an interesting addition to the study of digital literacies.