Cyber Space Is Like a Global Village

In Bloch’s article, Second Language Cyber Rhetoric, he focuses on that CMC creates new languages which combine English and the languages L2 writers use. When students are put in all English environments they are encouraged to express their own opinions because they don’t have to care too much. In traditional classroom, L2 students would be afraid of being teased or looked down because of their writing. Therefore, their writing abilities are limited, that makes them lose many opportunities to practice in classroom. However, in cyber space they don’t need to worry about that because everyone could be anonymous in Internet. That would make them like to write to share with others because they are free.

Furthermore, when L2 students are in CMC their writing are limited by the differences between English and their native languages. Chinese rhetoric, for example, we get used to be around bush before we hit the mark in writing. Students who use think logic to think may have to think a lot of things to spread what he want to write in his article. English, on the contrary, we learned that topic sentences should appear at the first sentence or first paragraph, making readers clear about what you want to express. Then students could develop writing according to their themes.

In my opinion, when two languages are in a CMC environment, their combinations are not bad things. Those “new” languages are characteristics of cultures, take immigrants for examples; they represent the history about where they come from and how they accustom to their second hometown. Such Spanlish or Chinese-English, I think they have their own characteristics and meanings; we couldn’t look down people who use these “languages”. In conclusion, CMC is one of the mediation that created new language, it is a trend and there will be more and more new languages are created because the development of Internet. It represents the concept of global village.