Second Language Literacy and Its Impact on the Writer’s Identity

Abstract

Identity and literacy range can change as the technology develops (Lotherington, 2007). This means that everybody can express different identity depending on the situation they are in. Besides, the scope of literacy itself is not merely about conventional writing (O’Brien, 2005). It becomes broader to multi-literacies as technology areas are considered to be the means to mediate literacy development which would influence the identity formation or identity act. This can be seen from the language used in the internet or the ‘netspeak’ (Crystal, 2006). ‘Engdonesian’ which is the combination of English and Indonesian languages as one of the ‘netspeaks’ is chosen to be analysed in this paper. The ‘Engdonesian’ which may perform certain role to express the users’ online identity is the real sample of English as a second language effect on Indonesian as the first language. The data containing ‘Engdonesian’ was taken from the writer’s blog or personal online journal on Friendster site that was individually published on 24 February 2008. Two questions are formulated in this study. They are (1) how does English as the second language influence Indonesian as the first language as in ‘Engdonesian’ appeared on the blog? (2) how is the second language identity of the writer (me) manifested seen through the influence of second language on the first language as in ‘Engdonesian’ on the blog? The analysis shows that English influence on the first language is to express the writer’s online second language identity which might be different to when the writer is offline. English was inserted on Indonesian writing on the blog so that the writer may feel accepted in the online community. That is because the alterations of language as on the code-switching and the reverse transfer may not mean that there are no Indonesian words to express what the writer wants to say on the blog. Therefore, the Indonesian language containing English influence as in code-switching and backward transfer was employed so that it would be more blog-friendly.

Keywords: second language identity, internet literacy, first language