Changes in the portrayal of bullying language. A discourse analysis of two young adult novels (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2021 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, , language: English, abstract: This seminar paper wants to investigate how the portrayal of bullying language and methods has changed over the last 46 years, because it is a fact that words have the power to hurt somebody deeply. For this purpose, two fictional young adult novels, "Blubber" by Judy Blume (1974), and "Friend me" by Sheila M. Averbuch (2020), were chosen.

The paper starts with an investigation into the language of bullying, taking into account a definition, different forms, and characteristics of bullying, the roles of the participants, and typical linguistic use of words and phrases. Afterwards, the methodology will be explained, accompanied by the data collection procedure and the data analysis, before the research findings will be explained. This starts with a brief introduction for each of the two books, a collection of sample passages, and this will then be concluded with a discourse analysis of the social actors, the analysis of bullying language, and the methods, which are used for peer victimization. Having analyzed each young adult novel in these three steps, there will be a with the aim of giving an answer to the research questions, taking into account the portrayal of bullying lan-guage and methods, how they have changed over the last 46 years. To round up the discussion, some suggestions will be given to teachers and educators, who want to deal with the serious topic of bullying and sensitize their pupils by using such fictional books.