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ERIC Number: EJ925596
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2011-May
Pages: 27
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0034-527X
EISSN: N/A
Young People's Everyday Literacies: The Language Features of Instant Messaging
Haas, Christina; Takayoshi, Pamela
Research in the Teaching of English, v45 n4 p378-404 May 2011
In this article, we examine writing in the context of new communication technologies as a kind of everyday literacy. Using an inductive approach developed from grounded theory, we analyzed a 32,000-word corpus of college students' Instant Messaging (IM) exchanges. Through our analysis of this corpus, we identify a fifteen-item taxonomy of IM language features and frequency patterns which provide a detailed, data-rich picture of writers working within the technological and situational constraints of IM contexts to creatively inscribe into their written conversations important paralinguistic information. We argue that the written features of IM function paralinguistically to provide readers with cues as to how the writing is to be understood. By writing into the language paralinguistic cues, the participants in our study work to clarify,or more precisely disambiguate, meaning. Through a discussion of four of these features--eye dialect, slang, emoticons, and meta-markings--we suggest how the paralinguistic is inscribed in IM's language features. ["Young People's Everyday Literacies: The Language Features of Instant Messaging" was written with Brandon Carr, Kimberley Hudson, and Ross Pollock.] (Contains 11 notes and 6 tables.)
National Council of Teachers of English. 1111 West Kenyon Road, Urbana, IL 61801-1096. Tel: 877-369-6283; Tel: 217-328-3870; Web site: http://www.ncte.org/journals
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A