Winnie’s task 11 brought up some interesting points for me also being someone who has to navigate routinely using two languages. For typing Chinese, I download a keyboard app that is much better suited to writing Chinese that contains its own predictive text software that varies from the predictive text of the phone makers. I find that the predictive text from my keyboard app is much closer to the regular way that I speak and interact as opposed to when I type English using the phone’s regular predictive text, which tends to stick much more closely to more commonly used expressions. The keyboard app will also keep up to date on slang and differing usage of phrases in Chinese so the app keeps the language more relevant than that of the typical phone software. While I am fluent in English, I don’t think an other language speaker gets to the point of being fully immersed in changing language/internet usage/slang while still living in their home country so my English usage and predictive text are definitely more conventional and less creative than my Chinese due to the different ways I interact with the languages.
I would be very interested to try this experiment with our students because our school operated differently to Winnie’s so I’d be interested so see the difference. With our students, they had access to computers and as the years went on, we went more and more technology based. The biggest struggle we ran into was trying to get students to operate in English. Many students would do most of their work in Chinese, throw it in a translator and then call it a day. Yes, even without the proofreading and if you’ve ever used Google translate for multiple sentences, you can guess how frustrating this was for the teachers.
That being said, the teachers would try and provide spaces where there was no choice but to use English, even digitally and I’m guessing that would impact the students as well. I would guess that their English predictive text would probably be a lot more formal than their Chinese because for most of them, the only time they would type English would be for academic purposes which would skew things quite a bit.
I’m sure there has been some research done on this but it would be interesting to have more people who speak multiple languages and have their predictive text functions analyzed on the differences between their languages and to see how that would look.