Public discourse is perennially concerned with young people’s communication (see Thurlow, 2005) and, in particular, the negative influence of digital media on their linguistic practices and conventional literacies (Thurlow,... [ view full abstract ]
Public discourse is perennially concerned with young people’s communication (see Thurlow, 2005) and, in particular, the negative influence of digital media on their linguistic practices and conventional literacies (Thurlow, 2014). As such, youth is confirmed as a key site for the maintenance of social order and the reproduction of symbolic capital. Against this backdrop, and following Thurlow (2001), this poster reports the results of a comparative, mixed-methods study of young Swiss people’s communication awareness; that is, the ways they themselves perceive and talk about (good) communication. In the context of Switzerland’s practical and mythological multilingualism (Watts, 1999), my study also considered their local language ideologies, as well as their media-ideological (Gershon, 2010) beliefs about the role of digital/social media in their lives. Data for this study was collected in a secondary school in the German-speaking part of a bilingual French-German canton, with 21 interviewees and 60 survey respondents. Following broadly content- and discourse-analytic procedures, my results reveal the ways – often reflexive and sometimes strategic – young people make sense of communication and, specifically, of language/s. Most striking, however, was the clear disconnect between adult perceptions of young people’s digital media use, and young people’s own understanding of its uses – and, particularly, their frustration at adults’ failure to recognize digital media as a potential teaching and learning resource.
References
Gershon, I. (2010). Media ideologies: An introduction. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 20, 283-293.
Thurlow, C. (2001). Talkin’ ‘bout my Communication: Communication awareness in midadolescence. Language Awareness, vol. 10, 213-231.Watts, R. (1999)
Thurlow, C. (2005). Deconstructing adolescent communication. In C. Thurlow and A. Williams (eds.). Talking Adolescence. Perspectives on Communication in the Teenage Years (pp. 1-20). New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Thurlow, C. (2014). Disciplining youth: Language ideologies and new technologies. In A. Jaworski and N. Coupland (eds). The Discourse Reader (3rd ed.) (pp. 481-496). London: Routledge.Watts, R. (1999). The ideology of dialect in Switzerland. In J. Blommaert (Ed.), Language Ideological Debates (67–104). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
