Teenage Talk Research Articles

‘God’s got your back’: teenage boys talk about God

This paper reports on ongoing research that has gathered data from 1100 boys, between 15‐ and 18‐years‐old, on the ways in which they experience and express spirituality. The paper is set against the background of a previous paper in this journal (Engebretson, 2004), that introduced the research and gave its theoretical framework. The focus of this paper is on the boys’ articulated experiences of the transcendent. The paper reports on these, claiming that transcendent experiences occurred for the boys in times that involved risk, fear, challenge, need and loss. Their sense of God was personal, one who was always there, who understood, who listened, who cared and protected. The paper then critically analyses why a much smaller percentage of boys who were given the opportunity to answer these questions did so, in comparison with the much higher percentage who answered the other questions on the questionnaire. Finally, questions are posed that will guide the research as it continues.

Taboo words in teenage talk

This paper reports on a corpus-based comparison of the use of taboo words amongst middle/upper class teenage girls in London and Madrid. Two corpora of spontaneous conversation were used for the comparison; these showed that the most frequent words used by both groups had sexual reference, followed by words to do with bodily functions. It also pointed to a higher frequency of taboo words in the London girls’ conversations, while the Madrid girls had a slightly higher preference for sexual words. The qualitative part of the study, which deals with the reasons for teenagers’ use of taboo words and with their various functions in the discourse, reveals that special emphasis is put on phatic use.

Trends in Teenage Talk: Corpus Compilation, Analysis and Findings

Trends in Teenage Talk: Corpus Compilation, Analysis and Findings

Trends in Teenage Talk: Corpus Compilation, Analysis and Findings (review)

Reviewed by: Trends in teenage talk: Corpus compilation, analysis and findings by Anna-Brita Stenström, Gisle Andersen, and Ingrid Kristine Hasund Ute Römer Trends in teenage talk: Corpus compilation, analysis and findings. By Anna-Brita Stenström, Gisle Andersen, and Ingrid Kristine Hasund. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. xii, 229. ISBN 1588112527. $76 (Hb). A large number of different types of text corpora are used nowadays to provide detailed descriptions of different language varieties. So far, however, the language of adolescents has not received much attention from linguists. A pioneering project in this research field is COLT, the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language. The nine chapters in Trends in teenage talk provide a detailed description of the design and compilation of COLT (Chs. 1–3) and offer accounts of an interesting range of research projects based on the corpus (Chs. 4–8),describing some of the central features of the language of adolescents. After a brief introduction that gives answers to the question ‘Why study teenage talk?’, Ch. 1, ‘From tape to CD-ROM’, describes the technical steps taken in the compilation of the COLT CD-ROM package. In Ch. 2 the reader is introduced to ‘The speakers’ and to the relevant nonlinguistic parameters (speaker age, gender, ethnicity, social class, region of residence) according to which the COLT teenagers differ. Ch. 3 provides a detailed description of ‘The conversations’ included in the corpus and subdivides them according to participant frameworks and conversation topics (e.g. ‘school’ or ‘the body’). Ch. 4, entitled ‘Slanguage’, focuses on slang, one of the most salient features of teenage talk. The authors present an overview of the use of swear words, vague words, and different types of slang expressions like wicked (‘proper slang’) or crap (‘dirty slang’) in the adolescents’ conversations, relating them to speaker gender, age, and school borough. Since reporting the speech of others seems to be typical of teenage talk, Ch. 5 centers on ‘Variation in the use of reported speech’. It discusses how COLT speakers introduce the utterances of others and what determines their choice of quotative verb (e.g. go vs. say) and verb form (e.g. simple vs. progressive). Ch. 6 deals with ‘Non-standard grammar and the trendy use of intensifiers’ such as really or absolutely and compares the COLT findings with figures from the spoken part of the British National Corpus, thus enabling [End Page 900] a comparison between teenagers and adolescents. This chapter includes some very interesting findings regarding grammar (e.g. on the use of well in line with very [it’s well wicked]) and morphology (e.g. on the increasing use of real instead of really). Ch. 7, ‘Teenagers’ use of tags’, discusses invariant tags such as right, eh, yeah, and innit as another trendy phenomenon in teenage talk. The focus is on the interactional and textual functions of these apparent universals of adolescent language. In Ch. 8 the authors demonstrate how some of the female COLT speakers engage in what is called ‘Ritual conflict’, that is, a verbal (usually humorous) dispute among teenagers. Ch. 9 concludes the book and stresses the importance of further analyses of teenage language. Trends in teenage talk gives an informative account of the main features and developments in the language of London teenagers in the early 1990s. It is an informative and entertaining book on a fascinating research topic: the language of children on their way to becoming adults. Ute Römer University of Hanover Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America

Television and the Reflexive Project of the Self: Soaps, Teenage Talk and Hybrid Identities

The purpose of this paper is to report on qualitative research into the role of television soap opera as a resource employed by teenagers in identity work. The central methodological strategy has been to enable young people to do the research themselves. Twenty groups of young people (aged 14-15) were recruited to talk about soap opera without an adult presence. The stress in the paper is on the formative nature of language in lending form to ourselves from the disorderly flow of everyday talk and practice. I argue that the girls construct reflexive identities in two grammatical forms. Identities are instanciated in the flow of language as well as in the self-narrative of 'I'. I am centrally concerned with the production of multiple, hybrid identities amongst British Asian girls. They see themselves as Asian yet distance themselves from aspects of tradition by virtue of their participation in other domains of British culture. They are both in and out of British society and Asian culture. These identities are complicated by gender relations so that ethnic and gender identities 'cross-cut or dislocate each other'.

Teen-age Parents Talk about School: Meanings for the Curriculum

Teen-age Parents Talk about School: Meanings for the Curriculum