The embedment of memes in the classroom

Boa Sorte (2019) lists three suggestions for using memes in the classroom. The first idea is to have students share their own memes with their classmates and let them analyze the meme based on Shifman’s three categories on meme analysis. The three categories include content, form and stance. Content refers to all the ideas and ideologies that are incorporated in the text(s).

Form means the composition of the message, so whether it has professional production qualities or not, whether it has public or private settings etc. Stance includes the participation structures, meaning the communicative functions and the identities of the addressor and addressee. The second idea is remixing existing memes with a focus on writing as a multimodal practice. Boa Sorte defines remixing as a gathering of information and combination of elements from different sources without changing the first source of information. This exercise should serve as a possibility for the students “to understand reading and writing in a different prospect […]

in order to explore discourses of dominant ideologies of patriarchal, heteronormative culture, issues of ethnicity, gender, social class, age and sexual orientation […]” (Boa Sorte, 2019, p.

60). Students get to explore new discourses that are rarely contemplated by mainstream media and at the same time, they get the chance to express themselves, their beliefs, opinions and views. Such freedom is extremely valuable, especially in such a young age as the students’. The third idea focuses on political memes. The aim is to show the students possible ways of reading and writing political memes and to stress the function of political memes as persuasion tools.

The elements of persuasion, the political ideologies and ethical backgrounds can be investigated and discussed. All three suggestions aim at developing creative methods to explore and spread ideas, promote self-expression and reflect critically (Boa Sorte, 2019). In this context, Fink (2020) highlights that it is important to educate children properly and help them develop a personal code of ethics in order to secure appropriate judgements and actions, not only in real life but also in the digital world. This can, as illustrated by Boa Sorte, be done by having a look at memes and discussing them together and decide on which ones are appropriate or can be interpreted as funny and which ones may go too far and why.

Another study by Purnama (2017) revolves around students’ creation of memes based on given topics that have already been discussed in the English classroom. The topics were symptoms and caring for elderly. The outcome of this task should be a correctly created meme, “correct”

meaning that the image choice fits the embodied text and the topic. In other words, in her study, she focused on the correct creation of a meme. For this reason, she ignored grammatical errors and mistakes in orthography. Some students managed to meet the expected criteria, thus image, text and content matched and made sense. Others completed the task in a less fulfilling and satisfactory way, lacking the understanding about homonymy in L1 and language expressions in L2 (Purnama, 2017). She concluded that memes are a creative and innovative tool in language teaching and lists three advantages of using her study’s approach in the classroom: The creation of memes is an eye-catching learning process, which probably increases students’ interest and their will for adopting this new method of language learning. Secondly, it is advantageous that meme creation is possible due to applications that make image editing on Smartphones and other digital devices possible. The last advantage stated is that the creation of memes is an enjoyable technique to familiarize students with the English language and to make them gain a better understanding of English class’ topics. It moreover supports the collaboration and communication between students and, when the memes are posted on IG and get likes, it gives the students a feeling of contentment. Similarly to Baran (2013), who, as above mentioned, states that the choosing of appropriate memes has to be well-conceived and is a rather difficult process for teachers, Purnama (2017) draws the conclusion that meme creation requires a high order of thinking and is a challenging task as well, which is why not all students are able to do it correctly. An example of a successful method of using memes in the classroom is the following, introduced by Baysac (2017). Students come up with their own memes regarding a certain topic and the teacher uses these memes on the other class for talking about that specific topic. This method appears to be quite effective, as the students assumably understand the memes a hundred percent and can relate to them due to the fact that they have been submitted by their peers (Baysac, 2017).

Concerning grammar and plainly linguistic features, Harshavardhan et al. (2019) did a short study on selected memes of English dialogues from Tamil movies that can be used for teaching various linguistic fields, such as grammar, pronunciation, semantics and discourse analysis in order to prove that memes can have educational purposes. In their study, they presented memes, which, according to them, aid the teaching and learning of the present simple tense, the present continuous, imperative sentences, interlanguage, pronunciation and distinguishing between right and wrong. For instance, they claimed that a meme saying, “I’m back” could be used for teaching present simple tense explaining that the words “I” and “am” become “I’m”. Basically, this meme would be used for teaching contractions. Another example would be “I am waiting”

and “start music”. Here the students can become aware of the present continuous tense, as well

as imperative sentences and the distinction between commands and requests, which both require the imperative. The conclusion Harshavardhan et al. draw from their study, was the following

The digital text in memes can be used to teach a wide range of sentence patterns. Tenses and the differences between one tense and the other can be elucidated. Linguistics theories, like interlanguage, are clearly defined and illustrated. The nuances of pronunciation and the influence of the mother tongue are clearly portrayed. The semantics of grammatically incorrect sentences is focused upon, and errors are easily highlighted (2019, p. 51).

They added that other influential factors for successful teaching through memes are the students’ awareness of popular culture and their media consumption. Some memes might be more challenging to understand for students than others, because at such a young age they might lack the ability to form connections between the addressed and shown topics, such as politics and cinema, and the semantics of the meme. Finally, they claimed that memes may never become a major material for lesson planning and curriculum development, but they can still be implemented in the classroom occasionally for teaching vocabulary and language structure, as well as register and speech etiquette (Harshavardhan et al., 2019).

In conclusion, memes and especially internet memes are gaining popularity not only in the private context, but also in public contexts, such as advertisements, politics and, most relevant for this study, in education. According to several studies, the implementation of memes in the classroom has already been tested and successfully conducted in various ways. The embedment of memes occurred through, for example, the creation of individual memes and the remixing and personalization of existing memes. Furthermore, the introduction of memes in the classroom aims the exploration and discussion of the background and hidden meanings of a meme, the analysis of a meme from different perspectives and the acquisition of linguistic and grammatical structures through memes thanks to a meme’s simplicity, humorousness and modernity. The present study, which focuses on the Learners’ Perspectives on the Use of Instagram and Memes for Promoting Language Learning and Sociocultural Competence addresses the aforementioned functions of memes in the educational context. It aims at gaining more information and collecting further data on the functions of memes and their educational purposes. This will be conducted by gathering students’ opinions and personal experiences on the general utility of memes in regards to language learning and the expansion of cultural and social knowledge, as well as their opinion on the embedment of selected memes’ in the classroom. The findings of the present study will then be compared to existing literature and the above-mentioned studies and theories on memes.