Pop Culture in Language Education

Theory, Research, Practice

Valentin Werner, Friederike Tegge, Valentin Werner, Friederike Tegge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367365417
• eBook ISBN: 9781000283372
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

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.

1Learning languages through pop culture/learning about pop culture through language education

Valentin Werner and Friederike Tegge

Abstract

This chapter provides a broad contextualization of pop culture in language education. It is argued that hitherto the vast inherent potential of pop culture for foreign language education has been underused and underresearched, and that this underutilization is surprising in view of the many supporting rationales from various domains (such as psychology, sociology, and language pedagogy). Pop culture is presented not merely as a catalyst for learning and a vehicle of various other instructional content but — particularly in the form of pop culture literacy and the engagement with non-standard language varieties — as a curricular objective in its own right. Eventually, it is suggested that pop culture should be accepted as a legitimate and valuable point of departure for a range of language-related competencies and topics. The introductory chapter further aims at showing how individual contributions in this volume are linked and how they are related to the general arguments pertaining to the use of pop culture in language education contexts.

1. Introduction

Why so serious?!

(The Joker in The Dark Knight)

In present-day societies worldwide, pop culture is ubiquitous in its various manifestations, such as pop music; shows and movies available in cinemas, on TV, and on streaming services; YouTube clips; podcasts; comics; cartoons; memes; video games; etc., with consumption rates for selected artifact types still increasing (Maudlin & Sandlin, 2015; Nielsen, 2019). While this may be considered stating the obvious, it is essential to note that in educational contexts a more general turn toward pop culture is a fairly recent (yet robust) development (Benson & Patkin, 2014; Browne, 2005; Peacock, Covino, Auchter, Boyd, Klug, Laing, & Irvin, 2018). Even though pop culture and its associated language have played a pervasive and socially highly relevant role in the lives of many language learners — adolescents in particular (Grau, 2009; Richards, 1994; Rothoni, 2017, 2019) — it is surprising that, to date, the use of pertinent artifacts and their language has been undertheorized and underresearched in applied linguistics and language education (Werner, 2018).¹ This neither implies that there is no relevant work at all that recognizes the potential of pop culture for language learning purposes, nor that language educators have ignored pop culture in their daily practice (see, for example Domoney & Harris, 1993 for an older relevant analysis). However, given its large social impact and many favorable theoretical arguments from various fields of study for using it (see Section 2), related investigations and materials seem to be comparatively scarce.

Following explicit calls for more empirical and narrative research, such as the one voiced by Liu and Lin (2017), the contributions in this volume can be seen as attempts toward further normalizing the use of pop culture materials in language education. To provide broader contextualization of the domain, the current chapter (i) outlines shared theoretical underpinnings and methodological approaches and (ii) connects what may seem like disparate strands of research within an overarching theme.

1.1 What is “pop”? What is “pop culture”?

A basic issue to tackle is how to define the “pop” in “pop culture”.² Numerous proposals circulate, which all emphasize various aspects and of which only a selection can be presented and discussed in sufficient detail here. In an effort to systematize approaches toward pop culture, Merskin (2008) establishes the following categorization:

(1)A pejorative meaning referring to objects or practices deemed lesser than or inferior to elite culture, that is, appeal to a mass audience;

(2)objects or practices well-liked by many people, that is, not the small groups of elite or wealthy;

(3)work designed with the intention of appealing to a great number of people, that is, commercial culture meant to be widely consumed; and

(4)things people make for themselves.

While definitions along the “deficiency” view exemplified in (1) can be viewed as traditional and have been largely overcome (Page, 2012), (2) and (3) certainly interact (with (3) focusing on consumption) and are central for language education. These characteristics are also reflected in pop culture essentially being “mass-generated print and nonprint texts […] that use multiple modes (for example, linguistic, visual, aural, performative) to communicate an intended message” (Hagood, Alvermann, & Heron-Hruby 2010, p. 81). An alternative definition emphasizes the function of pop culture in society by defining it as a “broad range of texts that constitute the cultural landscape of a particular time and/or place, as well as the ways in which consumers engage with those texts and thus become producers of new negotiated meanings” (Maudlin & Sandlin, 2015, p. 369; emphasis in original). While the latter part of this definition extends to section (4) of Merskin’s (2008) categorization, it is evident that pop culture centrally materializes in textual form,³ broadly defined. This makes pop culture artifacts a relevant object of study for language researchers and educators in the first place.

As a rule, pop culture texts represent scripted fictional(ized) content, even though the border between fiction and non-fiction admittedly may be difficult to draw sometimes (Queen, 2015), for instance when formats such as semi-scripted reality shows are considered. In addition, from the above definitions pop culture emerges as a multifaceted phenomenon encompassing a multitude of different artifacts and thus different text types (see also Marsh, 2008), which opens ample opportunities for language educators to use these texts in a flexible way, allowing adaptation of teaching approaches and contents to particular social and cultural contexts.

A few further aspects need consideration. First, due to its commercial nature, as inherent in definition (3) in Merskin’s (2008) categorization, pop culture traditionally has been criticized as commodified and conformist with mainstream positions and values, a perspective established through the Frankfurt school of sociology (see, for example, Adorno, 1941). However, more recently it has been emphasized that the respective oppositional or conformist nature of each manifestation has to be considered individually (Marsh, 2008) and that it is misguided to conceive of the pop culture audience as mere passive mass consumers (Rothoni, 2017). It is interesting to note that many works that are now considered “classics” and are associated with “high” culture initially were created with an intent to appeal to a mass audience (Hobbs, 2005), which is testimony to the dynamic and situated nature of pop culture and culture more generally.

The globalized nature of pop culture is another issue that is implicit in Merskin’s categories (2) and (3), with modern channels of distribution facilitating the spread of the manifestations worldwide (Marsh, 2008; Miller, 2015; Werner, 2018). As already mentioned above, an aspect strongly related to the globalized spread of pop culture is its connection to mass media (Queen, 2015). Mass media has been identified as one of the three main routes (besides personal networks and travelling) through which language learners come into contact with a target language outside institutional contexts (Grau, 2009; see further Sections 2.3.1 and 2.3.3), and this presently includes the ever more spreading digital media (Rothoni, 2017).

On a different note, it is crucial to mention the persisting bias toward Western(ized), and, particularly, American(ized) forms, and an overrepresentation of English as the language of pop culture (Liu & Lin, 2017). A look at the table of contents shows that the present volume can be considered representative of these biases, which are also reinforced by English serving as global lingua franca and being the most-studied second and foreign language worldwide (see, for example, Rothoni, 2017; de Wilde, Brysbaert, & Eyckmans, 2019). However, while English continues to feature prominently whenever language education and pop culture are brought together (Benson & Patkin, 2014; see also Lee & Moody, 2012), this certainly does not preclude other languages from being considered, and a number of contributions (Issa, this volume; Pai & Duff, this volume) illustrate this development.

In sum, in accordance with the foregoing thoughts, pop culture will be broadly conceptualized here. Its scholarly study represents a wide field in terms of both the various artifacts comprised and the theoretical frameworks and research-methodological approaches applied. Thus, language educators are encouraged to also apply a wide angle when engaging with pop culture to fully exploit its potentials.

1.2 Overview

In the following, a number of rationales for using pop culture in language education are presented (Section 2), and it is argued further why pop culture (in its own right) should also form part of the language curriculum, shifting the focus from educating through or with pop culture to educating about or for pop culture (Section 3). The final part (Section 4) provides some concluding remarks.

2. Rationales for using pop culture

I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.

(Michael Corleone in The Godfather)

Marsh (2008) presents a summary of what she refers to as “ideological rationale[s]” (p. 530) for using pop culture. While her overview derives from perspectives advanced mainly in first-language and literacy education, the principles appear sufficiently generalizable to language education at large.

Figure 1.1Ideological rationales for using pop culture (based on Marsh, 2008).

The Venn diagram shown as Figure 1.1 indicates that there is some overlap between the various rationales, which individually can be detailed as follows:

•Utilitarian model: pop culture is exploited as a means to lead to schooled literary practices;

•Culture capital model: pop culture is acknowledged as an integral part of students’ lives and valued as sole cultural experience in certain social environments;

•Critical model: learners are to be developed into critical readers and writers of both canonical and non-canonical texts;

•Recontextualization model: a new type of knowledge is created, bringing together home and classroom cultural spaces.

In addition to these general arguments, which serve as a kind of theoretical base on which other rationales rest, more specific factors favoring the use of pop culture in language education have been identified, as explained in the following (see also Duff & Zappa-Hollman, 2013).

2.1 Psychology of learning and motivation

I can’t get no satisfaction!

(The Rolling Stones)

A main argument for the use of pop culture artifacts in language education derives from their potential to affectively engage learners (Sposet, 2008; Tomlinson, 2017) and to discursively stimulate emotional experiences (see Langlotz, 2017). This emotional quality of the language material used has been found to potentially reduce stress levels and levels of language learning anxiety (Dolean, 2016), which naturally is conducive to language learning and may help to foster learners’ motivation, a key factor established in second language acquisition (SLA) research (for example, Loewen, 2014; see further ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Learning languages through pop culture/learning about pop culture through language education
• Part I The language of pop culture and language skills areas
• Part II Pop culture and classroom practice
• Part III Beyond the classroom
• Part IV Sociocultural and culture-critical considerations
• Index