Literacy in the Facebook Era - Waray Dictionary and Language ...

Fullmer 11
III. Analysis
With the repeated caveat that internet usage among Filipinos is quite varied, and therefore any
assumptions may or may not apply to a given individual, I offer four main conclusions:
1. Mastery of standard English is not improved by the reading and writing people do on
Facebook. Grammatical English, such as Examples 2, 3, and 5 are probably too few to make a
significant learning opportunity. The real question regards what linguists call “language
interference”: will exposure to nonstandard English weaken an individual’s cognitive ability in
grammar, spelling, or mechanics of standard English? This is difficult to know for certain, but we
would not, for example, expect a Waray-speaker’s exposure to Tagalog to weaken fluency in their
native tongue. And as a writer myself, I find I use many dialects of English ranging from academic
discourse to texting, and I personally do not feel that reading or writing text messages makes me a
lesser scholar. In fact, as I will propose below, understanding the idiosyncrasies of one dialect can
improve one’s sensitivity to another. By making students more aware of the differences between
internet English and standard English, teachers can empower students to be more discerning
practitioners of the language.
2. Facebook may improve reading comprehension skills due to the textual and cognitive
challenges posed by internet English. Kenneth Goodman (1967) writes,
Reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game. It involves interaction between thought
and language. Efficient reading does not result from precise perception and
identification of all elements, but from skill in selecting the fewest, most productive
cues necessary to produce guesses which are right the first time. (Bernardo, 2009,
p.2)
We use known phonic patterns to decipher the most probable meaning of unknowns: our brains
translate “mUsZtAh nA” into “Kamusta na?” We fill in knowledge gaps by constructing the most
likely answer. Try completing, for example, this scenario: “I went to the ________ but forgot my
_______ so I had to __________.” We then refine our guesses based on other context clues
(imagine if the first blank above now held the word “store,” “beach,” or “university” – how would