The interplay of global forms of pop culture and media in teenagers' 'interest-driven' everyday literacy practices with English in Greece

This paper reports on an ethnographically oriented multiple case study examining the everyday literacy practices in English of Greek teenagers. Informed by theoretical and methodological understandings from the New Literacy Studies, discourse analysis and ethnography, the study extended over a period of eighteen months and employed a combination of data collection tools to provide an 'emic' account of the everyday literacy practices in English of fifteen teenagers aged 14-15 living in Athens, Greece. The focus in this paper is on the interplay of global forms of popular culture and media in teenagers' 'interest-driven' everyday engagements with English. In particular, I discuss teenagers' everyday English literacy practices as they relate to their interest in various forms of popular culture entertainment such as music, sports and films. I discuss how such practices are characterized by rich intertextuality, circulation of texts and media and genre crossings and illustrate the ways they impact teenagers' positionality. I conclude my paper by discussing broader implications for English language pedagogy.