How do teenagers talk about reading in virtual forum QL?

Abstract

The virtual forum Què Llegeixes? is a reading community established by Institució de les Lletres Catalanes in 2005 in order to promote discussion about books and, especially, help in the task of recommending readings according to age. This research presents the results obtained by analysing the virtual comments readers have posted when discussing or sharing two different readings that belong to different reading paths. The first is, Mecanoscrit del segon origen, a nowadays classic novel that has been highly recommended at school, while the second is the trilogy that starts with Delirium, which we can classify as an impulse buy. We can find the virtual comments mainly in Fòrum Boli and Fòrum Ploma, that is, the sections targeted at users «aged 12 to 16» and «17 to 100». This research seeks to delve into their communicative exchanges, which occur in a non-academic space. We particularly analyse the sections where these two books are discussed, the kind of user who writes and constructs the comments and what the comments are like: the use of standard or colloquial language, the using of emoticons or phonemes, etc. We have used a quantitative and descriptive methodology as well as text and discourse analyses. Our research aims to show how, counter to the widespread assumption, when teenagers and young people write in these virtual spaces, they use standard language and take great care not to make mistakes.

Key Words: reading; virtual reading; public virtual epitext; Virtual forum; young people’s literature