Description of this talk

This project entails language teaching, being presented by a social linguistic professor, Dr. Christina Lintotos. Dr. Christina uses meta-linguistic approach as a way of mixing bilingual and multilingual concepts to her audience. According to her, bilingual lessons involve learning two languages while multilingual involves learning more than two languages. However, there are numerous types of meta- languages, including refrained, meta-discos, and meta-language 3. Refrained (meta-language 1) meta-language involves specific comments about language use, meta-discos (meta-language 2) involves expressions that are used to guide readers of a particular text, while meta-language 3 involves believes and attitudes towards language use and structure shared between speech in a community. Nevertheless, meta-language 1 helps us to understand meta-language 3 (Mo, 2015). However, media or public representation of information has great impact to multi-linguistic. For example, multi-linguistic can be under-represented or over-represented by the media. However, one of the challenges of media representation of multi-linguistic is that it keeps changing with time.

However, to for the speaker to show the extent to which multi-linguistic has change over time, some selected terminologies such as education, internet, and others are used. Moreover, the speaker depicts that the past researches on multi-linguistic, especially those conducted in the last decades shows that this concept was being under-represent by the media compared to the current research projects. For example, in the last decades, most students would only study English, as it was the core language represented by the media. However, as the media began representing other languages such as German and French, most students started learning and understanding most of these languages. For the case of bilingual languages, only English, French and Spanish languages are represented by the media. Apparently, in the media representation, multi-linguistic is associated with school education fluency, children, pupils, younger age among others (Mo, 2015).

However, there are mix reactions concerning the interaction of multilingual and monolingual speakers. According to a recent study that was presented by Dr. Christina, most multi-lingual languages are only perfect when used at the same time with monolingual languages. However, 15% of people agreed on this issue, 37 % disagreed, and many others had mix views (Mo, 2015). Moreover, the same study revealed that multi-linguals tend to disagree more than the mono-linguals. For the bilinguals, the speaker stipulates that most parents fear that their developing children would find it challenging to learn an extra language. However, this research shows that this is not true.

Assessment of this talk

This project appears more interesting especially to the college students. The manner in which Dr. Christina presents this lecture, especially through the use of simple examples, have made most of her ideas to be contemplated by the audience. Moreover, this presentation have made most individuals to learn that there three types of meta-languages, their description, and the impact that media has on them. Another interesting aspect in this project is the fact that multi-linguistic have changed over time, as supported by the review of the past and the contemporary research projects (Mo, 2015). However, for the influence of media to multi-linguistic, this project concentrates on the changes that can be derived from newspapers only. Further research needs to be conducted in order to ascertain whether the same changes can be identified from other media platforms such as social media. In addition, some languages such as Chinese may have a great impact to either bilingual or multilingual lessons and this can be established through conducting further researches.

References

Mo, N., (2015). Naanni2.3ga. accessed on 25^th April, 2015