Search

The study starts with the definition of local, translocal, and global linguistic context in the digital space. Facebook as a social media platform provides opportunities for everyday digital literacy practices such as code play. Code play allows mixing codes and repertoires usually with a humorous reference. We argue that creative interaction among languages creates the methodological need for a translingual approach besides the traditional code-switching theory to explain online linguistic phenomena. Adopting a netnographic approach, this paper presents two participants’ linguistic history, online linguistic practices, and perceptions of their own digital literacy, exploring their portrayal of (multi)linguistic identity which has local, translocal, and global resonance. The paper exploits possibilities of code play to accomplish communicative goals through code-switching and translingualism with a linguistically diverse audience.

Within the digital world, new multilingual contacts appeared, which led to a more multilingual Web and enabled local and global participation that assert new identities (Lenihan and Kelly-Holmes 2017). For multilingual people, language choice and code-switching serves as a means for users to perform a specific image of cultural or personal identity and signal their affiliation with a particular community. The paper analyses digital multilingual practices of bilingual (Hungarian-Romanian) university students in Romania. The data consists of students’ public Facebook profiles, examining language choice, code-switching, and hybrid practices. My research question refers to how their linguistic identity is constructed in their online communicative practices. Multilingual practices in the social media are not necessarily connected to language competences in a traditional sense and may serve as a space for resolving conflicting linguistic identities. In my data, students use their diverse linguistic and semiotic resources in varying ways to express and build their online identity, relying on the multimodal affordances of the digital world. Online multilingual practices rely on the speaker’s complete language repertoire, but they do not necessarily depend on language proficiency.

This paper seeks to cross the boundaries of what we consider linguistic landscape (LL) and open new spaces, thus examining the Internet as a complex set of linguistic landscapes. The present study is the result of an exploratory research. Virtual linguistic landscape (VLL) provides opportunities for language display that are rare in the geographical LL. This study investigates multilingualism and language practices present on the periphery of cyberscapes analysed in this research (namely the social media), based on questionnaires carried out among bilingual university students at Sapientia University. The conclusion will offer suggestions for further research on how to extend the boundaries of LL studies to the digital domain.

In my paper, I present a qualitative approach to the linguistic landscape of Hungarian schools in Sepsiszentgyörgy/Sfântu Gheorghe, Romania. These landscapes are called schoolscapes as they represent the material environment where texts and images “constitute, reproduce and transform language ideologies” (Brown 2012: 282). These manifestations reveal a lot about language learning and teaching in a formal educational environment. Beyond the simple representations of languages in education, we may trace more or less hidden curriculum details of foreign- and second-language teaching (English/German, Romanian) in a Hungarian-Romanian dominant bilingual setting. My aim is to describe the visual manifestations of the differences and similarities between the languages taught to minority children and the mutual efforts of teachers and students to meet the basic challenges of learning and teaching these languages.

The paper presents a qualitative approach to language learning beliefs while analysing case studies in detail to offer significant insight into these beliefs and language learning as well. A number of studies have shown that the belief system of language learners plays a decisive role in their success and failure in language learning (Bernat & Gvozdenko 2005; Horwitz 2008). The research presents the content analysis of interviews with bilingual participants. Interviews were carried out with migrant workers, other interviews with bilingual students in Romania, as well as online interviews with immigrant workers in the EU. The paper explores different beliefs learners hold regarding learning languages. By comparing migrant workers’ and students’ beliefs the complexity of positive and negative beliefs are presented. These may change due to previous and current language learning experiences, cultural-, social-, and educational background, personality traits, etc. The result of the qualitative analysis has shown that beliefs are linked to the particular language placed in a socialcultural dimension; the same beliefs may not be possible to be transferred to the next language being learnt, individual differences in beliefs regarding learning languages and their dynamic change in different language learning processes are investigated in details.

Abstract Background Future public health professionals are especially important among students partly because their credibility in light of their professional messages and activities will be tested daily by their clients; and partly because health professionals' own lifestyle habits influence their attitudes and professional activities. A better understanding of public health students' health and its determinants is necessary for improving counselling services and tailoring them to demand. Our aim was to survey public health students' health status and behaviour with a focus on mental health. Methods A cross-sectional study was carried out among public health students at 1-5-years (N = 194) with a self-administered questionnaire that included standardized items on demographic data, mental wellbeing characterized by sense of coherence (SoC) and psychological morbidity, as well as health behaviour and social support. Correlations between social support and the variables for mental health, health status and health behaviour were characterized by pairwise correlation. Results The response rate was 75% and represented students by study year, sex and age in the Faculty. Nearly half of the students were non-smokers, more than one quarter smoked daily. Almost one-fifth of the students suffered from notable psychological distress. The proportion of these students decreased from year 1 to 5. The mean score for SoC was 60.1 and showed an increasing trend during the academic years. 29% of the students lacked social support from their student peers. Significant positive correlation was revealed between social support and variables for mental health. Psychological distress was greater among female public health students than in the same age female group of the general population; whereas the lack of social support was a more prevalent problem among male students. Conclusions Health status and behaviour of public health students is similar to their non-students peers except for their worse mental health. Future public health professionals should be better prepared for coping with the challenges they face during their studies. Universities must facilitate this process by providing helping services targeted at those with highest risk, and developing training to improve coping skills. Social support is also a potentially amenable determinant of mental health during higher education.