Pedagogy, Audience, and Attitudes: Influencing University Students’ Metalinguistic Awareness About Texting Practices

Abstract

This chapter reports on a pilot study examining the effect of pedagogy on university students’ metalinguistic awareness of emergent norms of communication in text messaging. The specific foci of investigation are audience awareness, attitudes about appropriate use of language, and attitudes about particular language forms. Findings are based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of survey data collected over two semesters from 108 undergraduates at a large state university in the American Southeast. Our observations support previous findings that explicit instruction can lead to increased awareness of pragmatic norms. However, results also suggest an ongoing need to cultivate students’ metapragmatic awareness of their own language use in digitally mediated communication according to audience and in relation to their attitudes toward prescriptive norms, in order to enable them to recognize, analyze, and evaluate their own practices.