Fostering EFL College Students’ Register Awareness: Writing Online Forum Posts and Traditional Essays

Literature Review

The language use emerging from CMC has been identified as new forms of literacy (e.g., Crystal, 2001, 2011; Cummins, Brown, & Sayers, 2007; Lotherington & Jenson, 2011). As Crystal (2001) notes, various online discourse forms, such as e-mail, chat groups, and virtual worlds, display distinctive linguistic features governed by situational factors embedded in a specific format of the Internet. The time- and space-independent features of CMC result in the lack of visual paralinguistic and nonverbal cues which characterize face-to-face communication (Crystal, 2001, 2011; Dresner & Herring, 2008; Herring, 1996; Murray, 2000; 2005). CMC users usually generate simplified registers such as the use of abbreviation, simplified syntax, symbols, and formulaic phrases in their CMC writing (Murray, 2000). Furthermore, since language used in CMC context is full of “idiosyncrasy and variation” (Crystal, 2001, p. 15), the discourse generated in diverse online discourse communities is usually “socially transformative, enabling better communication, as well as more flexibility and expressiveness” (Kwaśnik & Crowston, 2005, p. 79).