33 Text production, text reception, and emotion

Abstract

This chapter takes the position that text production and text reception in the form of narrative stories are useful in understanding how multilinguals use emotion vocabulary in constructing identities since narratives shed light on how individuals use language to shape their lived, emotional experiences. The chapter examines how Puerto Rican return migrant students use emotional language as they construct Hip Hop identities through narrative stories in digitally mediated communication such as emails and websites. The chapter also focuses on how the electronic and interactive features of digitally mediated communication facilitate the use of emotional language in text production and text reception as Puerto Rican return migrant students engage in translanguaging in narratives to index Hip Hop identities. Results indicate that Puerto Rican return migrant students use emotional language in Standard English and African American English but not in Spanish when translanguaging in text production and text reception. Factors such as topic, language proficiency, and sociocultural competence contribute to this outcome. The electronic and interactive characteristics of emails and websites in digitally mediated communication seemed to influence interaction among text production, text reception and emotion vocabulary. Additionally, these characteristics spurred Puerto Rican return migrant students’ engagement in the acquisition of lexico-grammatical features of academic language in text production and text reception.