Adolescents’ perceptions of social media writing: Has non-standard become the new standard?

Abstract

The present study examines adolescents’ attitudes and perceptions with respect to writing practices on social media. It reports the findings of a survey conducted among 168 Flemish high school students with various socio-demographic profiles. The survey examines linguistic attitudes and awareness of sociolinguistic patterns in computer-mediated communication, as well as relevant language skills. Moreover, the present paper uniquely combines the study of both adolescents’ perceptions and their production of informal online writing, as the participants’ responses to the survey are compared to their peers’ actual online writing practices.The respondents appear to have a fairly accurate intuition with respect to age and gender patterns in social media writing, but much less so with respect to education-related patterns. Furthermore, while typical chatspeak phenomena are easily identified as such, ordinary spelling mistakes often are not. Strikingly, the teenagers do not claim a high standard language proficiency, although they do state to care about standard language use in formal contexts. Finally, some significant differences were found between participants with distinct socio-demographic profiles, e. g. girls and highly educated teenagers appear to be more sensitive to the potential negative connotations of linguistic features and that sensitivity seems to increase with age.

Lexical Patterns in Adolescents’ Online Writing: The Impact of Age, Gender, and Education

“…In fact, these students, and especially the students in the Vocational track, seem to use more words that relate to social or emotional processes in general (e.g., samen “together,” praten “to talk,” mis “miss,” helpen “to help,” ruzie “quarrel,” voel “feel,” pijn “pain,” kwaad “angry”). This higher rate of social words might be indicative of an attitudinal difference that mirrors a finding from our previous work (Hilte et al, 2019). We asked Flemish teenagers to evaluate anonymous social media messages and to guess the authors’ educational track.…”

“…Moreover, they had to list the (stylistic and content-related) cues used in their decision making. On a content level, students in more practice-oriented tracks (Technical and Vocational) were considered to be more "sociable," and, according to their peers, this characteristic was apparent in their online communication too (Hilte et al, 2019). A final minor difference concerns words relating to communication and social media.…”

“…These results may shed more light on the complex matter of whether and how informal online writing practices interact with literacy skills. While some studies report no significant short-term effect of CMC on youths’ school writing (e.g., Verheijen & Spooren, 2017, p. 6 for Dutch youths) or suggest the existence of register sensitivity among teenagers with respect to CMC- versus school writing (Hilte et al, 2019; Vandekerckhove & Sandra, 2016, both for Flemish youths), other analyses suggest (weak yet consistent) correlations between the overall use of CMC features and lower literacy levels (Drouin & Driver, 2014, pp. 264–265 for American undergraduates).…”

Linguistic Accommodation in Teenagers’ Social Media Writing: Convergence Patterns in Mixed-gender Conversations

“…'serving as punctuation in place of traditional punctuation marks' (Spina, 2017(Spina, , p. 27, 2019. We note that in informal online interaction, messages that end in full stops tend to be perceived as unkind or grumpy by youths, whereas emoji tend to be interpreted as more neutral/friendly post endings -a tendency that suggests the existence of alternative writing standards and conventions on digital media compared to 'classical' written genres (see Hilte et al, 2019). In the selected subcorpus, many teenagers indeed systematically end their messages with one or more emoji, in a punctuation-like way, and this also holds for heart-emoji.…”

Interlocutors’ Age Impacts Teenagers’ Online Writing Style: Accommodation in Intra- and Intergenerational Online Conversations

“…Finally, teenagers prove to be well aware of the sociolinguistic patterns described above. In one of our previous studies, they performed very well in an age-detection task, and their intuition on younger versus older adolescents’ writing styles was quite accurate ( Hilte et al, 2019 ). Consequently, age accommodation (see below) might not only be the result of subconscious pattern matching but could also consist of more conscious adaptations based on actual awareness of sociolinguistic patterns.…”