Put On Your Smiley Face: Learning Foreign Languages With Emojis

Language teachers all over the world have recently been asked the question of whether or not it is possible to learn a foreign language with emojis. Unsurprisingly, most of the teaching community answered that no amount of emojis could ever replace the number of linguistic skills used for everyday conversation. What emojis certainly can do is help introduce a language in a way that is both fun and visually engaging to the student.

The Basics

Emojis are these fun, expressive, universal colorful icons that simply pop up on phones and desktops everywhere, which also offer readers instant recognition and understanding. As far as language learning is concerned, the simplicity of the emoji can be used to promote easier access to the foreign language. The quicker emotions and objects are translated into symbols, the quicker students are then able to associate those symbols with the sounds from a new language.

At a Beginner's Level

At a beginner's level, students are already able to associate different words with different meanings, through the simple use of flashcards. At this stage, students can even be easily be encouraged to separate grammar from vocabulary and approach the new language through picture-word association or fun guessing games. Teachers might then introduce students to the spaced repetition systems (SRS), a fairly new flashcard-based software designed to help students revise and learn new vocabulary at their pace and which is mostly done through the use of emojis.

At an Intermediate Level

One thing that emojis do so well is that not only do they represent emotions, acts, or objects all on their own, they function even better when added together. Think of a row of emojis as a storyboard sequence in a comic book. Emojis play a hugely important role in message sharing and storytelling and that role can also be applied in the classroom as teachers can use emojis in fun game-like lessons or through visual storytelling. In a displayed message where one emoji follows another and then another, students can be encouraged to follow that order of thought in the same way they would with basic sentence structure, only now they would be using abstract ideas to fill in the gap between words.

Linguist Steven Pinker was the one who first forwarded the idea that we don't really think in the language in the first place. He then coined the term "mentalese" in his attempts to explain that other non-language we all use whenever we subconsciously pick objects or emoticons to represent abstract ideas and emojis would certainly be at the center of that subconscious language.

Talking and Learning With Emojis

Once students pass that initial barrier of awkward, interrupted conversations, they can even start using emojis to add subtext to their speech, by choosing either an object or around emoticon to add a new layer of meaning to their written words. Teachers can also use those same emojis, through new effective mobile language learning apps and reward their students progress through one or even two smiley faces right at the end of their assignments.