The Emergence of English as a Lingua Digital Within Chaos/Complexity Theory Framework
Keywords:
English as a Lingua Digital, Chaos/Complexity Theory, Language learning, COVID-19, coronavirusAbstract
English has now become a digital language with the rise of the digital age, especially with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and now due to COVID-19. Individuals’ interaction with the digital beings such as front camera, social media, and keyboards has allowed new words to emerge or caused some changes in the existing words. Regarding these dynamic changes, Chaos/Complexity Theory brought to English language teaching (ELT) field by Diane Larsen-Freeman (1997) might provide explanations while shedding light on the construction or emergence of new words. In this article, Chaos/Complexity Theory is revisited first as a transdisciplinary theory and then along with its main features in language learning field. Then, English as a Lingua Digital is proposed as a new concept to be studied by future empirical studies. In this sense, this article is the first one proposing English as a Lingua Digital within Chaos/Complexity Theory. The ideas in this paper may be the leading topics ELT research in a very near future considering the fact that there are not enough empirical studies utilizing Chaos/Complexity Theory.
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