The forms and demands of language learning are changing in the pandemic era. Learners no longer rely solely on a formal language curriculum. Instead, they are using various informal language learning (ILL) channels. Although informal language learning has been in the spotlight and is growing, more research on ILL is needed. In this study, ILL taking place through an online community was analyzed. Articles from the Korean learning community (r/Korean in Reddit) were collected, and the topic modeling technique, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, was conducted on the collected data. As a result, seven major topics were selected. The most common topics in all posts were issues faced by beginner learners, followed by vocabulary and sentence meanings, interest in Chinese characters and applications of Korean language skills, culture and daily life, translation, online learning materials, and Korean phonics. Through this, the interests of ILL learners and the characteristics of learners could be identified. Due to the nature of ILL, in which a formal curriculum does not exist, it was found that questions about general strategies for learning and questions that could not be solved in formal language education were most prominent. In addition, the characteristics of ILL learners who actively sought learning content and materials were also found.
This paper examines the distributional patterns of ‘swearing’ expressions produced in cyberspace in response to NAVER internet news articles. A range of contextual features associated with the use of swearing expressions are identified in terms of their tendency to be formulated as response cries produced as part of affectively-loaded assessments. Serving as a resource for managing face through footing shift, the ways in which swearing expressions are formulated and deployed embody the writer's orientation to treating the cyberspace where they are situated as a form of ‘social situation’ where at least some form of face/impression management is required. The predominant use of their variant forms is analyzed not simply as an attempt to outsmart the institutional attempt at controlling their use but as a collusive act through which the fellow participants are co-implicated in a collective word play organized as a cyberspace-specific form of language game. The tendency of the swearing expressions to cluster and resonate with each other suggests that swearing in cyberspace should be treated not simply as an unconstrained individualized act but as an act embedded in interactively-organized ‘word play’ activities that are obliquely, but crucially, geared to enhancing consensual grounds for shared affective stance among the members of the cyber-community of practice.
This research aims to find processes for developing the design language for the visual notes and design meaning of street furnitures. The result of this study are as follows. 1) The design language implies to get how to represent condensed symbols of the street furnitures. 2) The configuration of the street furnitures has their visual note and design meaning of community identity, represented their own detail design languages. 3) The detail design languages are useful to solve the matters of what design elements of the street furnitures can be composed of the visual notes and design meaning. 4) The detail design languages can be applied to the pattern of tools of Microsoft Office Word.