1st Edition
Pop Culture in Language Education Theory, Research, Practice
Pop Culture in Language Education provides comprehensive insight on how studies of pop culture can inform language teaching and learning. The volume offers a state-of-the-art overview of empirically informed, cutting-edge research that tackles both theoretical concerns and practical implications.
The book focuses on how a diverse array of pop culture artifacts such as pop and rap music, movies and TV series, comics and cartoons, fan fiction, and video games can be exploited for the development of language skills. It establishes the study of pop culture and its language as a serious subfield within language education and applied linguistics and explores how studies of pop culture, its language, and its non-linguistic affordances can inform language education at various levels of proficiency and with various learner populations.
Presenting a broad range of quantitative and qualitative research approaches including case studies on how pop culture has been used successfully in language education in and beyond the classroom, this book will be of great interest for academics, researchers, and students in the field of language education, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics, as well as for language teachers and materials developers.
Introduction
1 Learning languages through pop culture/learning pop culture through language education
Valentin Werner & Friederike Tegge
Part I: The language of pop culture and language skills areas
2 Teen talk in TV series as a model of linguistic innovation and emotional language
Silvia Bruti
3 Swear/taboo words in US TV series: Combining corpus linguistics with selected insights from screenwriters and learners
Monika Bednarek
4 Exploring the vocabulary of rap lyrics
Friederike Tegge & Averil Coxhead
5 Teaching grammar through pop culture
Valentin Werner
Part II: Pop culture and classroom practice
6 Going beyond the surface with pop culture: Using humorous cartoon series to explore social issues in the foreign language classroom
John Rucynski
7 Political comics and cartoons in language education: Suggestions for Arabic as a Foreign Language in classrooms in the USA
Sadam Issa
8 Eco-songs in foreign language education
Theresa Summer
9 Learning through sharing: Enhancing critical engagement with pop culture content using social media in a second language context
Anne Peirson-Smith & Lindsay Miller
10 Foreign language students, pop culture, and university degree thesis projects
Joe Trotta
Part III: Beyond the classroom
11 Pop culture in teaching Chinese as an additional language: Theory, research, and practice
Raymond Pai & Patricia A. Duff
12 "Watch out! Behind you is the enemy!" An exploratory study into the relationship between extramural English and productive vocabulary knowledge
Lieven Bollansée, Eva Puimège & Elke Peters
13 Levelling up comprehensible input and vocabulary learning: The lexical profile of videogames
Michael P. H. Rodgers & Julian Heidt
14 Pedagogically mediating engagement in the wild: Trajectories of fandom-based curricular innovation
Shannon Sauro & Steven L. Thorne
Part IV: Sociocultural and culture-critical considerations
15 Teaching "authenticity" of media and pop culture texts
Andrew Moody
16 The new normal: English language learning, pop culture, and the politics of investment
Awad Ibrahim
17 The use of K-Pop culture in a critical EAP classroom
Hyeyoung Jung & Graham V. Crookes
Biography
Valentin Werner is Assistant Professor at the department of English and Historical Linguistics of the University of Bamberg, Germany.
Friederike Tegge is a Research Associate at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa/Massey University and an English teacher at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
"This volume convincingly shows why pop culture must have a firm place in foreign language education- You cannot teach a language without teaching its (popular) culture."
Maria Eisenmann, Professor of English Didactics, University of Würzburg, Germany
“The prevalence of and widespread access to multilingual popular cultural artifacts make them a very real part of our everyday lives, and interacting with pop culture requires skills to manage and negotiate meanings. Decoding the language of popular culture is a fruitful exercise for all consumers, but foreign language students in particular may have the most to gain from such an endeavor. Pop Culture in Foreign Language Education not only acknowledges popular cultural capital but also definitively establishes the educational value of popular cultural materials. The range and diversity of artifacts included in the analyses and the inclusion of chapters which take turns highlighting methodology, application, and theory contribute to a multi-purpose volume that appeals to students and teachers alike.”
Kristy Beers Fägersten, Professor of English Linguistics, Södertörn University, Sweden.
"On the whole, Pop culture in language education is a pleasant and useful read. As a comprehensive volume that includes a range of pop culture artifacts and offers insights into their features and potential use in language classrooms, it can be a practical resource book for language educators and relevant stakeholders."
Duy Van Vu, International Journal of Applied Linguistics
