Language attrition

The mobile market is a highly competitive one, where Spark dukes it out with 2degrees and Vodafone. It suffers from high churn, where a proportion of customers regularly switch to follow the best offers in market. For example at the time of launching this campaign, 40% of Spark’s mobile customers churned annually. In large part this was because telcos generally find it difficult to truly differentiate at a product level. Lower the price of a plan or increase the data allowance to a plan, and Vodafone and 2degrees would match with their equivalent plan in hours. Creating sustainable differentiation was extremely hard at the product level. Consequently there was lots of excitement internally when Spark first partnered with Spotify, a music streaming service, to offer all customers on eligible plans a free upgrade to Spotify Premium. The logic was clear: it would be Spark’s first value add-on that 2degrees and Vodafone couldn’t match, so the expectation was a huge number of customers would take up the offer quickly, and therefore be less likely to leave Spark. All that needed to be done, in theory, was launch some fairly straightforward retail, offer-led communications – build it, and they would come. Except they didn’t really come. On April 2015, 16 months after launch, Spotify activations were well under target. About 65,000 customers had activated the free Spotify Premium they were eligible for – well below projections, and we had yet to see a significant effect on…

While reading The Things They Carried, I had a lot of comments to make about the style of writing, the stories O’Brien chose to recreate, and his meaning behind the writing. I have never read a book similar to The Things They Carried, and I doubt I ever will. O’Brien is unique in the way he combined nonfiction with fiction and differentiated between the two. He told the reader a lie, and then called his own bluff. This is something I admire in a writer; the ability to be both completely honest…

Even a century long time after his death, Wilfred Owen is still famous for his war poetry written during World War 1. In his poem, Owen uses various language techniques to vividly illustrate the horrendous reality of the war. Hence, he communicates his own anti-war feelings implied beneath his techniques. However, although he is now known as an anti-war poet, for once, he had been a naive boy, who had volunteered to fight in war. At first, he was thrilled to fight for one’s country. But soon,…

Soldiers face many things throughout the war, not just the fighting; terrible sights, agonizing pain, hunger, fatigue, and they also face a battle with their own mind. Each war brings its own conflicts. The similarities in the hardships that soldiers faced in the Vietnam war and World War I is immense. The two wars differentiae as well. They faced many of the same struggles; harsh weather conditions, scarce amounts of foods, protection, and post-war distress symptoms. The soldiers face constant…

Proficiency. Also within the chapter the book did a great job of discussing the distinctions between basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) and cognitive/academic language proficiency (CALP). One of the themes of this chapter that caught my eye was the idea…

Imagine a world where everyone had a common language they could speak to each other with. Imagine a word where hate crimes could be easily avoided by simply speaking the same language. Imagine conflicts that could have been avoided if we had similar ways of looking at the world. While dying languages are a good source of history, we should not save dying languages they build a barrier between us and would eventually be a waste of time. The foremost function of languages is to communicate ideas.…

Effects on Intelligence of Learning a Second Language as a Child Introduction: Learning a second language in early childhood reaps many benefits for intelligence. While Learning learning a second language at any time in one’s life brings benefits, but learning a second language early in life can be is even more beneficial for not only mental strength but also health. “Mapping the Bilingual Brain” by Chris Berube led me to this research question be interested in bilingualism and wonder what…

Unlike previous studies, Phinney et al. considers more subjective aspects of ethnic identity, and treats immigrant language proficiency as one of three factors contributing to it, along with parental cultural maintenance and ethnic peer groups. It finds language to be a significant aspect in ethnic identity in that it is reinforced by cultural maintenance and peer interaction (2001, p. 151). While participants’ relation to language varied with national origin, it played similar roles in…

Dudas (2011) found that college students with ESL or English as an Additional Language (EAL) are entering the nursing profession, but very little attention to deficiency in the English language is addressed (p. 14). Dudas (2011) identifies learning techniques to help EAL nursing students process information including using technology such as DVDs for individual instruction, vocabulary notebooks, and concept maps for visual representation (p. 17-18). Another area that she recommends is a…

globalisation and the development of local languages. The objectives of his study include 1. To establish if languages are parasitic. 2. To find out the factors that lead to language extinction.3. To see how globalisation has endangered most languages in the world and Africa in particular. Some of the works used for this deep study include:Mualdhuster (1996),Crystal (2000),Dixon(1997),Brenziger, (1998),Renard (2001).These works he uses content analysis and observation to study the ecology of…