Nouveaux médias et orthographe. Incompétence ou pluricompétence ?

Abstract

The present study investigates the hypothesis of a pluri-competence enabling new information and communication technology users to switch between traditional writing and computer-mediated communication as they change from one register to another. We collected young people’s (aged 14-15) written production across different media (electronic/paper) and communication situations (dictation, class activity, Facebook) in order to study the influence of these variables on the students’ spelling. The results obtained through the dictations show that the students’ level is relatively low (one mistake every 5 or 6 words) with a majority of grammatical mistakes, which is in line with previous studies on the subject. The analysis of linguistic units common to the three corpora indicates that all the participants use traditional spelling in at least one of the corpora. The same type of analysis conducted on the Facebook corpus shows that the teenagers master standard spelling in most cases (88% of the forms). Finally, we observe only a limited range of spelling variations in the Facebook conversations as well as a low compression ratio, which indicates that the linguistic units are rarely shortened.

Keywords

• computer mediated communication
• new information and communication technologies
• spelling
• Facebook
• diaphasic variation
• linguistic representations