REFLECTION 6

Reflection on CMC

Computer-Mediated Communication or CMC is not a new medium of communication as it has replaced the conventional medium of communication for decades. Society today is no longer practicing face-to-face communication because CMC is way easier and more convenient. Back in the day, job interviews were all conducted by face-to-face interviews where job applicants had to go to the place set by the company. Companies would write letters to the applicants, inviting them to turn up for interviews, and applicants had to wait for further responses by letters. In 21^st century today, technology has developed and the Internet has invented tons of social media sites. One of the most popular social media site today, especially among the youth. Instagram is also one of the multimodal online sites that feature uploading photos or image as a way of sharing with users and followers. People love Instagram so much because it is free and can be downloaded at App Store for mobile and PC, and people are more connected through photos. It has been proven by studies and researches that viewers’ gaze are directed towards image rather than text. Probably because people in modern world do not like to read or it can be that “a picture is worth a thousand words”.  Thus, it can be concluded that Computer-Mediated Communication today lessen textual communication and it has been refined to suit the revolving society. 

INTRODUCTION

Computer Applications in Language Studies is a subject that will be taken by BENL students in IIUM. This subject is taught by Dr. Rozina and for this subject, we were divided into few groups and each group have approximately four to five members. There are three assessments for this subject which are Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Corpus Linguistics (CL). 

The first assessment is CALL, where we had to find suitable websites or software or applications and we had to select one skill among these five skills; Listening, Speaking, Writing, Reading and Grammar. After that, together with the selected article that is suitable for this assessment, we did a research that would help teachers and learners in language studies. 

The second assessment is CMC where we need to analyse a particular corpus using any linguistics framework that we had been studying such as Halliday's Metafunctions and Multimodal Theory.

The third assessment is CL. For this assignment, we studied few topics such as Concordancer, Lexicography, Computational Stylistics and Forensic Linguistics. We also had to do a group test during our class regarding these topics.