British Teenagers Research Articles

Buddhist shrines: bringing sacred context and shared memory into the home

Previous research has recognized shrines in homes as sites of shared cultural memory with the function of contextualising religious narratives and bringing the sacred into the home. For Buddhists, shrines occupy a grey area between the cultural and the religious and have not been widely considered as indicators of religiosity. A quantitative study of 417 British teenagers self-identifying as Buddhists found that the 70% who had a home shrine were less likely to visit a Buddhist temple, but more likely to exhibit daily personal religious practice and to bow to parents. The attitude profile of those with shrines showed that these teenagers were generally happier at school, more collectivist, polarised regarding their identities, and strict about intoxicants. Heightened affective religiosity was linked with having a home shrine, particularly for female, late-teen, and heritage Buddhists. The article argues that, for these groups of Buddhists, a shrine represents a locus for shared memory, especially accessible to those of Sensing Psychological Types, but, for males, early teens, and converts, there is more a sense of shrines giving context to their Buddhist narratives.

“Help me move to that, blood”. A corpus-based study of the syntax and pragmatics of vocatives in the language of British teenagers

This study focusses on the use of the most common vocatives in the language of British teenagers and adults. Taking a corpus-based approach, it seeks to establish whether these vocatives are more frequent in the language of one group of speakers than in the other, and if so, what reasons might account for this. Also addressed is the position of vocatives in the utterance and the relation between position and pragmatic meaning. The final section looks in more detail at man and bruv/blood since these are among the most widespread and remarkable recent forms to emerge.Findings indicate that vocatives are clearly more frequent in the speech of British teenagers than in that of adult speakers. As expected, the majority of these items occur in final position. Regarding pragmatics, they serve a wide variety of functions, both interpersonal (summoning attention, creating solidarity among the speakers) and/or discourse-related (topic and turn management). We even find cases of more than one used in the same turn, and also examples of their metalinguistic use in reported speech. Finally, some of these vocatives have generally lost their deictic reference to the addressee, or may even adopt features of another category, such as pronouns, as in the case of man.

Negative concord in the language of British adults and teenagers

AbstractNegative concord (NC) (e.g.I don’t know nobody in Havering) has been the focus of a considerable number of diachronic as well as sociolinguistic studies, mainly in terms of its pervasiveness in the most common varieties of English. This paper contributes to the existing literature on the topic by examining NC in the language of British adults and teenagers. The findings, based on the analysis of data from three comparable adult and teenager corpora, indicate that: (i) NC is much more frequent in teenagers than in adults; (ii) the language of teenagers shows a wider variety of NC patterns than that of adults; (iii) the number of multiple negatives (e.g.I don’t want nothing to do with you no more) is not as common as expected, and they are found mainly in the expression of teenagers; (iv) pragmatically speaking, NC structures may be used to accentuate a negative meaning, although they are often equivalent to single negatives.

Keywords, semantic domains and intercultural competence in the British and Taiwanese Teenage Intercultural Communication Corpus

This paper reports on a corpus analysis of samples of intercultural discourse among a group of British and Taiwanese adolescents, exploring the statistically salient lexical features in online and spoken communication based on the British and Taiwanese Teenage Intercultural Communication Corpus (batticc). I employ a frequency-driven approach throughout the study to obtain insights into how language is used in these two different communicative settings. By the analysis of a keyword method and an extension to a semantic level using the Wmatrix corpus analysis tool, this study highlights the linguistic domains which deserve particular attention. Specifically, the key semantic domain analysis revealed the themes adolescent participants are mainly concerned with, and it revealed particular lexical choices with a great number of cultural and social differences between different groups of participants in the two modes of intercultural communication. The examination of the concordances within the key semantic categories further showed intercultural competence exhibited in batticc, including attitudes of curiosity and openness, relational knowledge, skills of discovery and interaction, and critical culture awareness. This study demonstrates the merit of key domain analysis in the understanding of intercultural competence and intercultural discourse in online and face-to-face settings.

Understanding Taiwanese Adolescents’ English Learning Selves through Parental Expectations

This paper explores the interplay of Taiwanese adolescent English learners’ motivational selves and their parents’ expectations, with a special focus the identified perceptions of both teenage leaners and their parents towards English learning as a duty and obligation. Using the L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS, Dornyei, 2009), the qualitative study foregrounds the cultural and relational aspects of the self system in understanding language learning motivation. Results from semi-structured interviews suggest that parental expectations of children’s English learning exhibit a duality characterized by the hope that their children will become successful members of the globalized world and a belief that English learning is a basic responsibility for their children. Adolescent language learners’ and their parents’ actual selves, including their identification with societal roles and social obligations, mediate between parents’ investments in their children’s English education and teenage learners’ perceived obligations to meet parental expectations. The paper concludes by suggesting further research on parental expectations and the development of global selves, and on the synergized effect of language learners’ actual selves and future self-guides in motivating language learning.

Self-categorization Theory and Perception of Coolness. An explorative study among British Teenagers

Brand coolness and “being cool” are two issues which potentially face companies marketing to teens and young consumers. In the current economic instability even teenagers have received a cut in their personal allowances and parent’s expenditures have become more restrained. Thus, being attractive for consumers by maintaining a “cool” image through a good positioning strategy is potentially one of the main aims of youth marketers in order to facilitate long term survival. The present study will offer a report from an exploratory research based on a series of semi structured interviews on teens’ perspectives on brand coolness. Results suggest that teens describe their ideal “cool” or “uncool” brands on the basis of different elements: while coolness is more related to specific product features, what it is uncool is instead associated to self and group categorization elements. This result is consistent also in other topics like advertising and music. A review of the theoretical underpinnings of coolness is also provided, moving from its historical origins to the latest developments.

Negative intensification in the spoken language of British adults and teenagers: A corpus-based study<sup>1</sup>

Intensification, a general device used by speakers to convey their message more clearly and to strengthen their position to it (Bolinger 1972), has been discussed widely in the literature. However, the specific use of intensification on negatives (i.e. it didn’t do any harm at all, I hadn’t the faintest idea who he was ) has received much less attention. The aim of this paper is to identify and explore the resources used by British adults and teenagers in the intensification of negative constructions. A second focus of interest will be the extent to which differences exist here in the language of adults and teenagers, given that the latter are, broadly speaking, more prone to use intensification. Findings indicate that the strengthening of negatives in English can be achieved in different ways: a) by means of a number of non-assertive and negative polarity-oriented items, such as in the slightest , in the least , at all , even; b) the repetition of the adverb never or the combination never ever ; c) cases of multiple negation or negative concord intended to heighten a negative meaning); d) negative polarity collocations and idiomatic expressions; and e) adverbs such as definitely , absolutely, certainly plus a negative ( not / no or nothing ). Teenagers tend to intensify negatives more than adults, although these differences are not so clearly marked as expected, and while the former prefer the use of swear words and idiomatic or semi-idiomatic expressions together with locutions such as no way , the latter opt more often for negatively oriented polarity sensitive items.

Wearing a T-shirt got me arrested: Wearing punk clothes in 1970s London was dangerous, but now British teenagers can wear anything

Wearing a T-shirt got me arrested: Wearing punk clothes in 1970s London was dangerous, but now British teenagers can wear anything

Composition in portraits: Selfies and wefies reveal similar biases in untrained modern youths and ancient masters

ABSTRACTPrevious analyses suggest that artists prefer poses showing the left side of the subject’s face when composing a portrait, but showing the right side when composing their own self-portrait. There is also some evidence that artists may prefer compositions with key features on the right of the picture. Do these findings generalize to spontaneous, pseudo-artistic productions by individuals with no formal training in painting and art history? To investigate this issue, we tested a sample of 104 British schoolchildren and teenagers (mean age = 13.8 years; 80 females). We analysed posing biases in individual photographic self-portraits (“selfies”) as well as of self-portraits including also the portrait of a friend (“wefies”). Our results document a bias for showing the left cheek in selfies, a bias for placing the selfie-taker on the right in wefies, and a bias for showing two left cheeks over two right cheeks, again in wefies. These biases are reminiscent of what has been reported for selfies in adult non-artists and for portraits and self-portraits by artists in the 16th–18th centuries. Thus, these results provide new evidence in support of a biological basis for side biases in portraits and self-portraits independently of training and expertise.

“Skittles & Red Bull is my favourite flavour”: E-cigarettes, smoking, vaping and the changing landscape of nicotine consumption amongst British teenagers – implications for the normalisation debate

Aims: From an academic discourse explaining trends in drug-related attitudes and behaviours, “normalisation” now also encompasses public health policy advocating “denormalisation” of smoking. This study explored young people’s attitudes and behaviours to cigarettes and e-cigarettes to ascertain whether a process of “renormalisation” was underway. Methods: A six-month multi-method study was conducted in NW England. Data collection in April-July 2014 included a convenience sample survey of 233 students; secondary analysis of a 3,500 respondent survey; stakeholder interviews; participant observation sessions; focus groups; and participatory research events with over 100 students. Findings: With the public performance of “vaping” valued as an indicator of experienced use, young people used e-cigarettes primarily for flavour combinations and to perform “tricks”. Smoking cessation and nicotine consumption were less important motivations. When comparing e-cigarettes with eight indicators of normalisation – additionally, legal status and risk perception – there were indications of a growing cultural accommodation of “vaping”. Conclusion: The changing landscape of nicotine and non-nicotine products challenges traditional conceptualisations of “smoking” and “non-smoking” and problematises the notion of linear processes of normalisation in respect not just of young people’s tobacco and nicotine use, but more generally, of delivery systems and the drugs dispensed within them, suggesting marketplace-differentiated normalisation.

Non-standard capitalisation and vocal spelling in intercultural computer-mediated communication

This study reports on a corpus analysis of samples of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) on an electronic discussion board among a group of British and Taiwanese adolescents, paying specific attention to the most distinctive cues of CMC: non-standard capitalisation and vocal spelling. I evaluate a newly developed corpus of online discussion, the British and Taiwanese Teenage Intercultural Communication Corpus (BATTICC). I used Python programming to calculate all the instances of non-standard capitalisation (specifically, all upper-case words and the use of lower case instead of upper case) and vocal spelling from the corpus, and I also applied Wmatrix to identify the semantic and part-of-speech fields of all these instances. Moreover, initial quantitative analysis was employed to inform further qualitative analysis to identify the pragmatic functions of cues in this intercultural context. It was evident that the CMC cues perform important interpersonal functions, and the analysis demonstrates different preferences by the participants for different purposes.

Selfy as a Mental Disorder-A Review

Selfies frequently trigger perceptions of self-indulgence or attention-seeking social dependence that raises the damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't spectre of either narcissism or very low self-esteem”. Psychiatrists believed that behaviors could generate more mental issues in the future, especially those related to lack of confidence. You've seen it thousands of times on facebook and other social media outlets, there is even a song on the radio about it Selfies have become a huge trend in social media and psychiatrists and mental health workers are linking them to mental health conditions related to narcissism and a person's obsession with their looks. How far can the selfie obsession go A British male teenager went to the extent of trying to commit suicide after he was unable to take what he felt was the perfect selfie. Danny Bowman became so obsessed with capturing the perfect shot that he would spend roughly 10 hours per day taking up to 200 selfies trying to get the perfect shot. As things got more and more intense for Danny, he lost nearly 30 pounds, dropped out of school and did not leave the house for six months as he kept trying for the perfect picture. During his suicide attempt, Bowman was saved by his mother.

Give It a Tug and Feel It Grow: Extending Body Perception Through the Universal Nature of Illusory Finger Stretching.

If British teenage boy asks you to pull his finger, it is usually an indication that he simultaneously wishes to break wind. If you were to tell him that you could pull his finger and stretch it to twice its length, you might expect a similarly irreverent response yet when we pulled the fingers of nearly 600 children and adolescents, 93% reported the illusion of stretching. Grossly distorted body representations need not be the preserve of clinical disorders and can reliably be induced in healthy participants across all ages.

“Go up to miss thingy”. “He’s probably like a whatsit or something”.

In this paper we focus on some of the so-called ‘placeholders’, words that are almost empty semantically, used with multiple functions in communication and whose meaning has to be inferred by the listener (Jucker et al. 2003: 1749). This category of placeholders includes terms such as thing, thingy, stuff, thingummybob, thingybob and whatsit. We firstly identify the most common words in this category in the language of British adults and teenagers and we then consider them from a syntactic, a semantic and a pragmatic perspective. Our findings suggest that (i) the importance of these words lies in their pragmatic rather than in their semantic functions; (ii) contrary to what we expected, placeholders are not more common, statistically speaking, in the language of the younger generations than in that of adults; (iii) adults and teenagers share some of the uses of these terms; (iv) in the language of teenagers these dummy words are used in a wider range of contexts and situations. We finally contend that these lexical items show properties typical of pragmatic markers, since they help in the organisation of discourse, they are sometimes used as devices to hold or cede the floor and they also function interpersonally by promoting cooperation between the participants in the conversation.

British Family Life, 1780–1914, ed. Claudia Nelson (general editor) (5 volumes). Volume 1: Growing Up, ed. Claudia Nelson; Volume 2: Husbands and Fathers, ed. Julie-Marie Strange; Volume 3: Wives and Mothers, ed. Susan B. Egenolf; Volume 4: Extended Families, ed. Susan B. Egenolf; Volume 5: Substitute Families, ed. Julie-Marie Strange

These volumes, which present a wide range of contemporary documents and sources, trace with great intricacy the immense variety of British family life across the long nineteenth century. There are many delightful gems to be discovered, including archival material and rare printed matter. The volumes also give a voice to a number of authors who have long deserved a wider audience for their contemporary significance, such as the Church of Scotland minister William Duff (1732–1815), and the Baptist author Esther Copley (1786–1851). The collection opens with a volume dedicated to ‘Growing Up’, edited by Claudia Nelson, who is also the general editor. Here, there is a stimulating diversity of texts, and some highly unusual extracts—such as the diary of an Argentinian-born British teenager, Emily Krabbé, visiting London for the first time in 1869. In another interesting move, Nelson reprints extracts of young Louisa Gurney’s diary from the 1790s, as well as the fictional Work-House Boy (1825), written by Louisa (now Hoare) many years later as an adult. Working-class children are less well served, emerging as victims of cruelty and as labouring ‘slaves’, rather than situated within the complex obligations of the family economy and affective ties. Nonetheless, this remains one of the strongest volumes in the collection.

Keeping it in the family? Re-focusing household sustainability

Recent research on how best to support the development of pro-environmental behaviours has pointed towards the household as the scale at which interventions might be most effectively targeted. While pro-environmental behaviour research has tended to focus on the actions of adults, almost one-third of UK households also include children and teenagers. Some research has suggested that young people are particularly adept at exerting influence on the ways in which the household as a whole consumes. Yet this influence is not only one-way; parents continue to have direct input into the ways in which their children relate to and interact with the objects of consumption (such as personal possessions) through routine processes including acquisition, use, keeping and ridding. In this paper I draw on qualitative research with British teenagers to highlight how young people and their parents interact when managing household material consumption. I use this discussion to suggest that promoters of sustainability might increase the efficacy of their efforts by engaging households as complex family units, where individual household members’ distinct priorities are linked by shared familial values, and where family-based group identity is used to encourage shared commitment to lower-impact living.

A first glimpse at mobile instant messaging: Some sociolinguistic determining factors

AbstractDespite the vast body of research on the linguistic peculiarities of Instant Messaging and Short Messaging Service, little is known about the language used in Mobile Instant Messaging in a cross-generational and cross-cultural context. To fill this gap, the crosslinguistic study addressed here is an attempt to approach age-specific variation from a blended ethnography approach. The current research is grounded on an analysis of a naturally-occurring dataset of WhatsApp messages from the point of view of oralisation and deviations from standard forms. Two distinct generations of English and Spanish texters provide empirical data on the parameters of the oralised written discourse suggested by Yus (2011): emoticons, orthographic mistakes, phonetic orthography, abbreviations, acronyms and clippings, and the use of words in other languages. Subsequently, an analysis of the interviews held with the writers approaches the factors that may determine language variation in the messages. The conclusions drawn highlight the persistent use of deviations from standard language of English and Spanish teenagers. The study confirms a higher frequency of a conversational style in Spanish than in English. Not only brevity and speed reasons but also familiarity, playfulness and intimacy with the addressee are behind the intentional variations used.

The Quotative System in Spanish and English Youth Talk. A Contrastive Corpus-based Study

The speech of teenagers is rich in narratives, with the direct reproduction of speech, thoughts, and non-lexical material often introduced through the use of quotatives. This paper aims to compare such quotative markers in English and Spanish.. Findings indicate that both Spanish and British teenagers make use of a wide range of specific quotatives in their speech. For example, in English go and (be) like prevail clearly over general reporting verbs such as say, think and ask. In Spanish, we also find a system of both general reporting verbs (decir, ‘say’, contar, ‘tell’, preguntar ‘ask’) and those more typical of teenager speech (y yo…. ‘and I ...’, en plan ‘like’, es como “it's like”, saltar , ‘come up with’, etc). However, in Spanish the latter represent only 25 percent of the total, compared to almost 50 percent in English. Linguistic factors (grammatical person, aspect, tense, content of the quote) seem to constrain differently the choice and function of the quotatives observed in the teen talk of English and Spanish.

Variation, development and pragmatic uses ofinnitin the language of British adults and teenagers

The so-called invariant tags, such aseh, okay, rightandyeah, are extremely frequent in general English speech and have been studied extensively in recent years, especially in the spoken expression of teenagers, where they are a very common feature.In this article I focus oninnit, as inShe love her chocolate innit?andIt was good innit?For this purpose, I analyse and discuss data extracted from two comparable corpora of teen speech: theBergen Corpus of London Teenage Language(COLT), compiled in 1993, and theLinguistic Innovators Corpus(LI), created in 2004. The analysis considers the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of the expression, and asks three fundamental questions: hasinnitremained stable in use over time or has it increased in frequency? Hasinnitpreserved its original grammatical features, or has it undergone notable changes? To what extent isinnitespecially associated with teentalk, at least in London speech, rather than with the speech of adults? Contrasts are also drawn with the standard tagisn't it.Findings confirm thatinnitis typical of the language of London teenagers and has not gone out of use; on the contrary, its frequency has increased over the last few years. In contrast, the proportion of tokens found in the language of their adult counterparts is rather marginal. At present,innitconserves syntactic features of its own: it does not follow the regular question tag formation rules and can represent not only the verbbebut alsodo,haveand most of the modal verbs. Furthermore, it continues to show a high degree of flexibility in the sentence, occurring not only in final but also in initial and medial positions. Finally, it appears thatinnitshould no longer be regarded as a simple invariant tag. It tends to behave more and more like a pragmatic marker serving to express the speaker's attitude to the content of the message, thus often reflecting the relationship between the participants in the interaction, and also contributing to the organisation of the discourse. In this respect, two new discourse functions ofinnitare identified and described: emphatic and text organiser.

‘With us, we, like, physically can’t’: Transport, Mobility and the Leisure Experiences of Teenage Wheelchair Users

This paper reflects upon the experiences of 69 British teenage wheelchair users in their attempts to access leisure environments. Heiser’s (Heiser, B. 1995. “The Nature and Causes of Transport Disability in Britain, and How to Remove It.” In Removing Disability Barriers, edited by G. Zarb, 49–64. London: Policy Studies Institute) notion of transport disability is developed, and the concepts of transport anxiety and mobility dependency are explored. The challenges that young people in general experience when attempting to access public and private forms of transport (namely, buses, trains, taxis and private cars) are discussed, and the additional ‘layers’ of disadvantage experienced by teenage wheelchair users explored. The ramifications of barriers to transport for young wheelchair users in particular are shown.