way2go! 5, Band für Lehrerinnen und Lehrer

52 transcripts Coursebook (audio + video) Interviewer: Professor, could you maybe just summarise the main results of your study for our listeners? Seaton: Yes, certainly. This is a study that was sponsored by a mobile provider, and we wanted to find out to what extent people are using emojis and how this influences their way of communicating. And, not surprisingly, 80% of the 2,000 people we asked said that they were using emojis on a daily basis, in their text messages or emails. Now if you consider that emojis only started to be included in smartphone systems around 2011, you can see that this new language is growing really fast, and its use is more widespread than, say, that of abbreviations like ‘thx’ for ‘thanks’ and ‘atm’ for ‘at the moment’. Interviewer: Do you have an explanation for this success story? Seaton: Well, one reason for the fast growth of emojis is the universality of the signs. True, there are some signs that are culture-specific, like the white flower used in Japan meaning ‘excellent homework’, which would probably be lost on a British student, but most signs, like the smiling face or the sad face, can be understood across all cultures and, even more importantly, by users of different ages. Another reason is that emojis are a very efficient way of communicating complex emotional experiences. If you take the emoji ‘laughing face with tears of joy’, which was selected by Oxford Dictionaries as the Word of the Year, we have one symbol, the emoji, and we’d normally need about, I don’t know, 20 to 30 letters to convey the same meaning. Interviewer: So do you think that in a couple of years’ time, we will only be using emojis to communicate? Seaton: At the moment, there is no arguing with the expressive power of emojis. I think emojis are a sign of our times, just like digital communication, and the two go very well together. But I’m not sure emojis will replace real language, although there have already been some interesting experiments. Alice in Wonderland, for example, has been translated into emojis. The first three signs are ‘backhand pointing down’, ‘rabbit’ and ‘heavy red circle’ – and they stand for Alice’s journey down the rabbit hole. The whole book is a four-foot-tall poster made up of 25,000 emoji symbols, and while it sounds like an interesting experiment, I think I prefer the book form to the poster form. ( laughs ) And we must remember that people have been using pictures for centuries to educate, illustrate and simply express their feelings, so the concept of emojis is nothing new, it’s the technology that makes it so wide- spread and universal. One of the reasons why I think it won’t replace ‘real’ language is that language doesn’t just consist of words that can easily be translated into pictures. We frequently use words like ‘we’ or ‘is’, ‘was’ and many abstract words like ‘courage’ or ‘hope’, and a lot of meaning gets lost if we can’t use these words. Interviewer: Well, Professor Seaton, that was very informative. Thank you for sharing your ideas with us. Seaton: Thank you for having me! Carl: Yeah. Q: Do you really? Carl: Yeah, I mean if a teacher throws a long movie or the lights go out and they do the projector, you know it’s just, you put your head on the desk and it’s more comfortable than you would think. V/O: And thinking is one of the things that gets sacrificed without enough sleep. Carl: Just trying to, you know, conjugate verbs in Spanish at 7:30 or, you know, find the derivative or the anti- derivative of some function, stuff that really takes a lot of cognitive effort, and I just can’t do it in the mornings. V/O: The paediatrician Judith Owens warns there’s a whole lot more in a teen’s life that’s affected by sleep deprivation. Judith Owens: They are moody. Depression is a concern. It affects every aspect of their lives. V/O: For many teens, the solution comes in a cup. Q: What are you having to drink? Teen: A caramel macchiato. Q: OK, what did you have? Teen: I had two espresso double shots. Q: Two espresso double shots! And what did you have? Teen: The same thing. V/O: The caffeine may help teens perk up during the day, but it only masks the underlying biological reason for their sleep habits: the natural inclination to go to bed late. Carl: I’m not really motivated to go to bed at ten or whatever, when I should go to bed because it’s just, I can’t force myself to sleep. V/O: Like all teenagers, Carl’s body clock shifted with puberty, changing what is called his ‘circadian rhythm’. Judith Owens: An 8- or 9- or 10-year-old is able to fall asleep at 9 o’clock at night. But a 13-, 14-, 15-year-old has their circadian rhythm shifted so they’re not able to fall asleep till 10, 11 or 12 o’clock at night, naturally. V/O: Then add in today’s distractions. Carl: We can download music, we can talk to our friends by just moving our fingers and it’s just so much at the same time that we can, you know, entertain ourselves beyond probably what’s reasonable. Father: Good night, get some sleep. V/O: So short of getting school start times changed, teens just might have to take some advice from experts. Say goodbye to the entertainment zone in the bedroom, cut the caffeine out after lunchtime, set up a daily sleep and wake time routine. And beware, trying to catch up by sleeping in on weekends throws off your rhythm, and do something relaxing before bed, like reading a book. Coursebook, Unit 05, exercise 4b ( À 10) Announcer: Listen to an interview with a university professor about the language of emoji. Interviewer: Hello and welcome to Bognor Radio Station and ‘Features of Today’. With me in the studio today is Professor Eva Seaton. She’s Professor of Linguistics at Exeter University and we’ll be talking about a new study that she’s co-authored, on the language of emoji. Good afternoon, professor, and thank you for joining us. Seaton: The pleasure is all mine. Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv