Linguistic Strategies in Students’ Digital Story Telling on the Threads/x Platform: A Contemporary sosiolinguistic study

Abstract

This study employs a contemporary sociolinguistic approach to examine the language strategies of students’ digital storytelling activities on the Threads/X platform. Storytelling, as a multimodal and participatory practice, is affected by sociocultural dynamics and platform affordances in the age of digital communication. The study employs content analysis and qualitative descriptive method to examine students’ use of language resources in constructing identities and narratives. To collect data, we examined posts by students on the Threads/X platform that were related to digital storytelling techniques. Next, linguistic features including code-switching, hashtags, emoticons, informal language and other multimodal features that support meaning-making were extracted from the data. Moreover, the analysis explores the ways in which students engage with audiences and strategically use language to negotiate their identities in online groups. By analyzing these linguistic patterns, the study aims to illuminate the role of digital storytelling as a site of social interaction and self-expression. The findings are also expected to contribute to sociolinguistics research on digital communication and pedagogical insights on using digital storytelling in language learning contexts. Also, the importance of knowing students’ language habits on the emerging social media platforms is highlighted in this study, besides drawing attention to the dynamic relationship between language, identity and technology in modern communication. Multimodality, student narratives, digital communication, sociolinguistics, linguistic strategies, Threads/X, digital storytelling.