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Nine ways to use emojis in the English classroom
Through trial, error and mild emoji-obsession, Colm Boyd, a materials writer and British Council teacher in Barcelona, has produced these tips for English language teachers.
These activities work best when the class has a limited selection of emojis – perhaps 20 to 30. To avoid confusion, this selection should include a name for each emoji (e.g., Face With Tears Of Joy).
1) Decide on one area of language
You can use emojis to practise many different areas of language, but some focus is required to pre-teach or elicit the target language for the activity. Here are some examples: Adjectives of feelings or personality: The Blush emoji means that the sender is feeling embarrassed.
Idiomatic expressions to describe feelings: The Face With Tears Of Joy emoji means that the sender is laughing their head off.
Descriptions of physicality and expression: The Blush emoji has red cheeks and is grinning in a shy way.
Narrative tenses for imagining stories related to emojis: Farah sent David the Eye Roll emoji because she had been waiting for him for over twenty minutes and was becoming impatient.
Present tenses and expressions for describing routine when learners describe their own emoji-use habits: I’m always sending the Thumbs Up emoji. I probably use it a few times a day!
2) Write an emoji conversation
For an engaging writing activity, look no further than the emoji dialogue. Learners work in pairs and first select five emojis each. The task is then to invent a conversation, incorporating one emoji into each message.
Learner A (picks Weary emoji): Sabine, I think I forgot my keys again (inserts Weary emoji).
Learner B (picks Eye Roll emoji): Theo, this is the third time this week. You’re so forgetful (inserts Eye Roll emoji).
The low-tech option is to give learners paper with speech bubbles, where they will write their dialogue and draw the emojis. If your class have access to smartphones, they could create their dialogues in WhatsApp, take screenshots and email those to the teacher. If learners have tablets or laptops, they could complete the dialogue using a template on Word or Google Docs.
3) Write an emoji translation
Are your learners straining their imaginations to invent a story to practise narrative tenses? One great idea is to show them a story that is ‘written’ in emojis. Then, ask them to translate it into ‘real’ English.
Images are part of daily life and carry social and cultural meanings, beliefs, values and power relations. Though images are a major part of what we do and see every day, teachers may not be aware of how to deal with them in the classroom. Theorizing visual communication in order to include it in a curricular program is a necessary step in teaching (Unsworth, 2001). In the context of teaching English as a foreign language (EFL), a multimodal pedagogical approach applied to images that identifies specific dimensions of reading visual images and written texts is very important since it contributes to the ability to read texts in a critical manner. This is specially the case of schools in Brazil, where official curriculum guidelines include suggestions about multimodal teaching. […]
Critical reading should not be limited to text-based resources. In fact, given that, currently, society is bombarded with visual images, it can be argued that students need tools that will help them understand the values and ideologies presented in visual texts (Browett, n. d.). […]
Images are articulated in visual compositions also producing ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings. As with oral or written discourse, images act as a form of representation, identity negotiation and social relations (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006).
While the various aspects of a visual image […] are always present in visual sources, they have not been widely explored in the context of Brazil, though multimodality, or practices that use multiple modes – textual, spoken, linguistic, spatial and visual resources (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006) – have been emphasized as a key notion to explore (Oliveira, 2008).
Under the assumptions of Almeida & Souza (2017), Text 3 presents a possible implementation of a multimodal approach in an EFL classrooms because