Weblogs and Literary Response: Socially Situated Identities and Hybrid Social Languages in English Class Blogs

Students engaged in literary response on weblogs they wrote and maintained for an 11th‐grade English class. Three focal students, all members of a “regular” American Literature class in a school that is highly invested in The College Board's Advanced Placement program, forge hybrid social languages from the discourse of formal literary analysis and the discourse of digital writing. In doing so, they position themselves as “serious literature students” by employing tools of literary analysis modeled and expected by English teachers at this school, and as “web‐literate communicators” by playing with language in ways that would not ordinarily be sanctioned as appropriate in English classes. In addition, each student borrows from other intertextual social languages to read class texts in new and unsanctioned ways, sometimes consciously and unconsciously pushing against dominant school culture.