Analysis of particular Netspeak elements in closed discussion within the Information and Communication Technologies course

摘要

Asynchronous discussion can take place no matter how distant you are and therefore are playing a very important role of any e-learning system. On-line discussion allow students to consider and examine other people's thoughts and opinions on a specific topic and answering on them in a concise and logical way. On-line discussions are better quality than traditional, in-class discussion. Within the ICT course taught in a first semester at Zagreb School of Economics and Management, we use two types of online discussion, so called opened and closed discussions. Opened discussions represent every day, informal communication between the students and the teachers while the closed one are related strictly to the course topics. In this paper we will analyze the use of some particular elements of language in closed discussion on two levels: teacher - student and student - student. Netspeak is a new language of information communication found on Internet in a form of chat, text messages and msn. More rapid, more direct, natural and almost spoken. Some scholars consider this kind of phenomenon a degradation of a written Croatian language while some others thinks that language is constantly changing no matter what, under any circumstances and that the Netspeak is just the result of the changes. Analyzed parts of the Netspeak in this work are those the most subjected to changes, as for Croatian language those are the omission of diacritical marks, increasing use of acronyms and abbreviations and the introduction of signs meaning actual state of mind or mood, so called emoticons. We expected the discussion between students and teachers to be formal, highly respecting the norms of the written Croatian language and the discussion between students to be less formal, more near to the Netspeak.