Text-making practices beyond the classroom context: Private instant messaging in Hong Kong

This article explores the ways in which instant messaging (IM) texts are produced by a group of university students in Hong Kong. Even though there exists a body of research on linguistic issues of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in non-Western contexts, much emphasis has been placed on the features of CMC English used by ESL learners. Instead of focusing on one particular language, this article reports on a number of language-related issues that are specific to the Hong Kong CMC context such as the use of Chinese and English, invented Cantonese spellings, and code-mixing. Drawing upon qualitative data such as observational notes and interviews, my study analyzes the text-making practices associated with the use of IM (ICQ and MSN Messenger) within the New Literacy Studies (NLS) framework [Gee, James Paul. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies. London: Routledge; Barton, David, Hamilton, Mary, & Ivanič, Roz (Eds.). (2000). Situated literacies, London: Routledge; Street, Brian V. (1998). New literacies in theory and practice: What are the implications for language in education? Linguistics and Education, 10(1), 1–24], which is a social practice approach to the study of reading and writing in real-life contexts. This article concludes by arguing that learning to produce texts in IM involves an entirely different process from that of formal language learning in the classroom. In a multilingual society like Hong Kong, teachers and educators need to be aware of such differences so as to bridge the gap between actual uses of language in students’ private lives and the form of language used in the formal classroom context.