Communicating across educational boundaries: accommodation patterns in adolescents’ online interactions

Abstract

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.