Abstract
This paper studies linguistic accommodation patterns in a large corpus of private online conversations produced by Flemish secondary school students. We use Poisson models to examine whether the teenagers adjust their writing style depending on their interlocutor’s educational profile, while also taking into account the extent to which these adaptation patterns are influenced by the authors’ own educational background or by other aspects of their socio-demographic profiles. The corpus does reveal accommodation patterns, but the adjustments do not always mirror variation patterns related to educational profiles. While salient features like expressive markers seem to lead to pattern-matching, less salient features appear less prone to ‘adequate’ adjustment. Lack of familiarity with the online behavior of students from other educational tracks is a factor too, since online communication clearly proceeds primarily within ‘same-education’ networks. The focus on cross-educational communication is quite unique in this respect and highly relevant from a sociological perspective.
Funding source: Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek
Award Identifier / Grant number: 12U2620N
Acknowledgments
We thank Ella Roelant for statistical advice.
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Research funding: This research was funded by the FWO (Research Foundation Flanders) under grant number 12U2620N.
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Communicating across educational boundaries: accommodation patterns in adolescents’ online interactions
- Tracking telecollaborative tasks through design, feedback, implementation, and reflection processes in pre-service language teacher education
- Individual versus pair work on L2 speech acts: production and cognitive processes
- Self-identity construction and pragmatic compensation in a Chinese DAT elder’s discourse
- Verbal and nonverbal disagreement in an ELF academic discussion task
- Relationships between struggling EFL writers’ motivation, self-regulated learning (SRL), and writing competence in Hong Kong primary schools
- Chinese university students’ self-regulated writing strategy use and EFL writing performance: influences of self-efficacy, gender, and major
- Does one size fit all? The scope and type of error in direct feedback effectiveness
- Immersing learners in English listening classroom: does self-regulated learning instruction make a difference?
- The pedagogical potential of speech-language therapy materials for the teaching of idiomatic expressions in a foreign language
- “This topic was inconsiderate of our culture”: Jordanian students’ perceptions of intercultural clashes in IELTS writing tests
- Positioning of female marriage immigrants in South Korea: a multimodal textbook analysis
- Hearing parents learning American Sign Language with their deaf children: a mixed-methods survey
- Teacher resilience and triple crises: Confucius Institute teachers’ lived experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic
- Translanguaging in self-praise on Chinese social media
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Communicating across educational boundaries: accommodation patterns in adolescents’ online interactions
- Tracking telecollaborative tasks through design, feedback, implementation, and reflection processes in pre-service language teacher education
- Individual versus pair work on L2 speech acts: production and cognitive processes
- Self-identity construction and pragmatic compensation in a Chinese DAT elder’s discourse
- Verbal and nonverbal disagreement in an ELF academic discussion task
- Relationships between struggling EFL writers’ motivation, self-regulated learning (SRL), and writing competence in Hong Kong primary schools
- Chinese university students’ self-regulated writing strategy use and EFL writing performance: influences of self-efficacy, gender, and major
- Does one size fit all? The scope and type of error in direct feedback effectiveness
- Immersing learners in English listening classroom: does self-regulated learning instruction make a difference?
- The pedagogical potential of speech-language therapy materials for the teaching of idiomatic expressions in a foreign language
- “This topic was inconsiderate of our culture”: Jordanian students’ perceptions of intercultural clashes in IELTS writing tests
- Positioning of female marriage immigrants in South Korea: a multimodal textbook analysis
- Hearing parents learning American Sign Language with their deaf children: a mixed-methods survey
- Teacher resilience and triple crises: Confucius Institute teachers’ lived experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic
- Translanguaging in self-praise on Chinese social media