Vocabulary and pragmatic characteristics of in parents’ discourses about parenting experience sharing on social media

Abstract

Social media is becoming increasingly popular in people lives. Social media has also become an environment and platform for parents to share their parenting experiences in nowadays digital age. This paper aims to study vocabulary and pragmatic characteristics of the discourse sharing parenting experiences on social media in order to provide suggestions for searching for information related to parenting experiences. Discourse samples were collected from 4 famous Facebooks and 10 Tiktoks that have a large number of followers. Discourse samples consisted of 120 posts, 480 comments, and 270 discourse units including 1256 key vocabulary units and 382 speech acts used for discourse analysis. Deductive analysis and thematic content analysis were used. The results reveal that the discourse sharing parenting experiences on social media exhibit five types of vocabulary areas, five form of speech acts and three conversational interaction characteristics through simple discourse structure, non-normativeness and multimodality. Based on these characteristics, the paper suggests future research directions when applying parental discourse analysis as well as proposes the development of digital applications to support parents in accessing and exchanging information effectively, in accordance with practical needs, contributing to promoting digital transformation in family and community education.