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Peer-Group Membership and Youth Identities in “Translocal” Activity Spaces

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Teenagers’ Everyday Literacy Practices in English
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Abstract

In this chapter I zoom in on teenagers’ activities with English in “translocal” activity spaces where they interact with friends or other users from around the world sharing similar interests. In these spaces, English increasingly features as the preferred medium of expression for its cultural connotations as a global language and as the language of popular culture. In more detail, this chapter foregrounds that teenagers’ English language practices in these contexts are characterised by vernacular language use, language mixing, linguistic creativity and playfulness and, finally, the “remixing” of different resources—particularly English language popular culture snippets—eventually leading to the production of hybrid texts. Through these practices teenagers display their social identities by either indexing their “coolness” or indicating their membership in the global community of English users.

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Rothoni, A. (2019). Peer-Group Membership and Youth Identities in “Translocal” Activity Spaces. In: Teenagers’ Everyday Literacy Practices in English. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33592-2_6

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