ABSTRACT
Participating in new digital media occupies much of young people's lives. In the US, for example, 94 per cent of 18–29 year olds are online (Pew Internet 2011). A similar trend is found in Asia. In Hong Kong, for example, 35.5 per cent of internet users are university students (eMarketer 2011). Most online platforms are textually mediated, involving a great deal of reading and writing activities. Producing and using digital texts thus becomes a crucial part of young people's literacy practices. It is for these reasons that this chapter focuses on university students’ private writing practices online. Creative linguistic features in online writing such as abbreviations, emoticons, stylized spelling and typography, or what Crystal (2006) refers to as ‘Netspeak’, have been studied extensively from a linguistics perspective (e.g. Shortis 2001; Crystal 2006; Goddard and Geesin 2011). While teachers may be aware of these innovative linguistic features, they rarely have access to students’ private online writing. This is also causing moral panics and much public debate about how digital media are negatively affecting students’ literacy skills (Thurlow 2007). What teachers need to understand is not just what new linguistic features are available but why and how they come into being, and how informal learning takes place as students engage in private online writing activities. In view of this, research on digital literacies emerged to look into details of everyday digital practices (Ito et al. 2010; Sheridan and Rowsell 2010). Much of this work has practices as a starting point, leading to implications for pedagogy. Alongside details of practices, this chapter adopts an approach that also foregrounds the role of digital texts as language.
