Social Identity and Discursive Practices Online for Students of Spanish as a Foreign Language

Abstract

The article presents a descriptive study, part of a broader research, that explores the relationship between literacy practices and activities in two digital spaces, Facebook and Instagram, and the way in which users decide to reveal their values, beliefs and identities in public online spaces to a global audience. The analysis of their texts were used with the purpose of 1. Demonstrating which are the literacy practices that help them to build their discourse in Facebook and Instagram; 2. Stablishing the relationship between the design and configuration of both networks and the way participants write and share multimodal contents. A total of 11 participants took part in the research, all of whom were foreign students in different Spanish universities or educational institutions. The discourse analysis was carried out categorizing the texts and multimodal content shared; and taking into consideration some of the elements proposed by Hymes (1972). The text is considered as a multimodal communicative event (Krees and Leeuwen, 2001) integrated by lexical and multimodal elements (images, emojis and emoticons, hashtags, links, etc.). The results were triangulated with a semi-structure online interview, with the aim students could validate or reject the interpretations and meanings derived from the discourse analysis.