"Please check for grammar.": Code-alternations in a language learning blogging community

Abstract

This paper looks at code-alternations in the language-learning blogging community "Lang-8". In this community, users write blog posts in their target language and receive feedback and corrections from native speakers. 116 blog posts with the target language English are analyzed in detail. Around 2/3 of those blog posts avoided all code-alternations. Among the remaining third, the most frequently observed type of code-alternation involved translation of part or all of the blog post (interlinear translation and en bloc translation), or switches motivated by lexical need (complex lexical gaps). Quoting, other sentence-level switches and word-level switches for meta-linguistic discussion were rare. The author argues that technological affordances, different understandings of one's audience and of the language learning process, and, to a limited degree, community norms, shape code-alternations and their avoidance.