Literacy of Croatian vocational school students in school assignments and texts written in new media in leisure time

Abstract

Communication by means of new media inevitably leads to changes in language that are reflected in a new type of discourse. The main features of this discourse are the use of abbreviations, emoticons, dialecticism, anglicisms, neologisms, vulgarisms, and profanities. This way of writing, however, is often seen as writing with a lot of errors, which then have a negative influence on literacy in general and, particularly, on the literacy of young people. Therefore, during 2016, the authors of this article conducted a research study of the real literacy of young people analyzing school assignments written by students in their final years of vocational schools and their communication in new media. The 2016 research study was a follow-up study to the research study that had been carried out in 2015 with grammar school students. This new research study compared vocational school students with grammar school students in Croatia.