Hi Anita

I have a group of 10th - 12th graders doing a Broadcast Journalism course - they make two shows a week for our school and make short documentaries and news reports for my course.

1.    TOPIC –CREATING THE TEXT

AGE – 16 TO 18 YEARS

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

How young people write today, using language which is very different from the language they formally learn in the classrooms.

We are interested in knowing/ sharing the language young people use today in their informal (non formal) communication which interestingly is aimed at keeping adults ( parents, teachers) out of their circle- one of the functions this language serves.

We would like to see how young people in our partner country use language in in-formal situations – compare with India.

correspondence between us on September 3 about starting projects

My response:

I did a lot of work on anti-language for my PhD http://neuage.org/ODAM.htm For example, I wrote (page 258 in the pdf of my thesis that is on the above site) The concept of an anti-language is a useful way of understanding the social basis of the form of this exchange. Michael Halliday has written extensively on the topic of anti-language, referring to it as slang developed by members of “antisocieties” such as criminals and prisoners. My Honours degree from Deakin University (“Graffiti as Text” 1995) focused on anti-language as the language of gangs, adolescents and hip-hop/graffiti crews. In my thesis I researched the development of language that graffiti crews used to communicate with one another.  

I would like to have my ten students in my Broadcast Publication course work in an online form - maybe Skype or Google Plus - social sites such as Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China though I seem to be able to get Google Plus. My students area mixture of USA, Korea, Chinese - all speaking English, most as a second language. We meet for 90 minutes every other day if we could tee up a meeting time that would be great.

Here are my class times for the next two weeks (China Time - you are two and half hours a head of us )

·         Tuesday 4th September - 2:20 - 3:45 (about two in the afternoon your time)

·         Thursday 6th   12:45 - 2:10 (10:15 your time - )

·         Monday 10th 10:20 - 11:45 probably too early

·         Wednesday 12th 8:45 - 10:10 probably too early

·         Friday 14th 2:20 - 3:45