Dialogic Discourse of Telegram Channels Targeting Children

Online platforms and cross-platform messengers communicate with their users, which offers relevant material for dialogic discourse studies. Scholars tend to focus on the dialogic discourse of adult population aged 18 and over while the dialogic nature of cross-platform messengers for children and teenagers remains understudied. This research featured the category of dialogism in children’s content published on a Telegram channel for young native speakers. The research material comprised 30 stimulus texts and 1,393 responses selected by complete sampling from the Telegram channel Mult, which targets children between 1.5 and 6 years old. The texts were subjected to sender-centered and recipient-centered approaches, as well as to discourse, intent, and comparative analyses. The dialogic nature was realized in children’s content through interrogative sentences, interrogative pronouns, imperative verbs, images, and videos. In the responses, interrogative sentences created a new micro-topic to which both the sender and the recipient could respond. The response texts could have both a dictum and a modus component. The stimulus text and its response related to one another as dictum–modus, dictum–dictum–modus, and dictum–dictum.