Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to talking ELT, the easiest place to learn about the big issues in language teaching. We're joined again today by Ed, Charlotte and Nick, and we'll be continuing our conversation on multimodality.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: So we've just been talking about how we can help students critically view and interact with multimodal texts. And we're given a lot of great examples of things you can do in the classroom, things you can do outside the classroom, and how to help students develop these critical viewing skills. And I want to do something a bit more tangible and a bit more practical here by looking at some memes, because students are going to be interacting with memes all the time. They appear in their, in their news feeds, in their social media feeds. So I want to share some on screen and maybe talk about how we can, how we can help students interact with them and view them critically and how they can kind of be read in the way you would read a traditional written or spoken text.
So, yeah, just, just as an example, so that we can kind of dig our teeth into something and see how that could then be extrapolated to other modes of communication. So I'm going to share some memes now, and I've pulled together some english language teaching and learning memes, so it's going to be quite topical.
So for those who are listening, rather than viewing, we are sharing one on the screen, and it's the Spider man meme.
And all the Spider man are pointing at each other and they are labeled tough, taut thought, though, through thorough and throughout.
[00:01:55] Speaker C: Very good teacher, very good. Excellent pronunciation and lovely mediation of what we're looking at as well, which is another, I guess, multimodal skill that creates.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Well, this is interesting how this is a multimodal podcast, but of course, while there's a video version, some people will just be listening.
[00:02:12] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:02:12] Speaker B: So this is our first meme.
[00:02:15] Speaker C: So there should only be one Spider man, right? That's the basis for the meme. And suddenly it's, who is the real Spider man or this conf. Again, I've never been quite sure what this meme was, where it comes from.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: So this one's taken from a comic, I think, where Spider man runs into another Spider man, and they point at each other going, wait, who are you? And then a bunch of other spider man enter the same speed, and they're all like, wait, what's going on? And of course, someone's then taken this and put an english language teaching joke over the top of it.
[00:02:45] Speaker C: That's a great way to express the frustration that you can have or the confusion, I guess, of having learned a word and then extrapolated a rule from that word and then finding that it doesn't work or that it's been.
[00:02:57] Speaker E: Yeah. It highlights the challenges of learning English as a. As a second language.
[00:03:02] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I like that one. I think it's a good one. And I suppose, yeah. Talking about the meaning of that and interacting with that and how those different meanings interact with each other, I think that's the kind of activity which we need to be looking at, I suppose.
[00:03:16] Speaker C: And it's worth pointing out here that this could be a pre task. Right. So the teacher could show a meme like this to a group of students, introduce or develop the topic of confusion, multiple versions of something which is. Which are very similar, and then ask the students to create their own memes. So redesign is a really important part of digital literacies, and getting students to create their own memes is a great application of this literacy. Digital literacy, yeah.
[00:03:45] Speaker E: You know, to hear what our own learners struggle with when it comes to learning vocabulary and that closeness in pronunciation or confusion in pronunciation, this would be a great meme to exploit that. And I think it's also a really nice way of acknowledging with our learners that it is a tricky language and that we have got vocabulary such as this that makes it difficult to learn, you know, and for native speakers as well, you know, my nephews, they have a real strong focus on phonics at school now, and looking at these sort of. Sort of consonant clusters that you get, and then, you know, the vows that precede them, but how the sounds can often change just depending on what the word is, you know, it's not easy.
[00:04:52] Speaker C: I have one problem with this meme.
[00:04:53] Speaker B: Go on.
Tough.
[00:04:55] Speaker C: Spider man looks the least tough of all of them.
So if I was. If I was redesigning this, I think I'd switch, though, with tough, because the.
[00:05:07] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:05:08] Speaker C: Do you know what I mean?
[00:05:09] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, I can see that.
[00:05:11] Speaker B: See, you say, though, with toughness, like, where's tho? Which one's, though?
[00:05:15] Speaker E: Maybe that's an activity in itself, huh?
[00:05:17] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:05:18] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:05:19] Speaker B: Okay, I'm gonna move us on to our next and next meme. I've got a couple of them.
So for those listening, we have a man reaching for a yellow ball, and he's labeled me, and the yellow ball is english proficiency. And then the next scene is grammar rules, grabbing him from behind and pulling him away so he can't grab the ball. And I like this one because this is. This is kind of a standard format which appears a lot about oh, this is something I want. Oh wait, hang on. I'm not getting it because of x. I remember a version of this I saw which was um. Which was me. And um, the person was labeled me and instead of english proficiency it was labeled something like um, going to the movies or my social life. And um. The grammar rules. The grammar rules was COVID.
[00:06:00] Speaker E: Yeah I've seen that one. Yeah. Yeah I mean this reminds me of a student I had years ago and wonderful turkish student and uh, she was so obsessed with grammar rules that it was really inhibiting her from just sort of just going out and just speaking and conversing in English and you know I guess is this meme saying that like me is aware of this or that, you know the grammar rules just keep coming to grab you to say no, you're not getting the proficiency right because you haven't mastered the grammar rules. I don't really know but yeah in my mind I see grammar rules as the problem here.
[00:06:42] Speaker F: Yeah, yeah but is the grammar rules holding him back or is it lifting him?
[00:06:48] Speaker E: Exactly, exactly.
[00:06:50] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:06:51] Speaker C: And what's that? Is that a bead of sweat? Is it a tear?
[00:06:54] Speaker B: I think it's a bead of sweat. I think it's meant to be a bead of sweat.
[00:06:57] Speaker C: And Chris, to have a critical viewing of this, I wonder, are there any masculine identifiers on the me? Because you did say it was a man in your description, but a student might say well, teacher, what makes you say it's a man?
[00:07:10] Speaker D: Yeah, that's true.
[00:07:11] Speaker B: No, that's a very good.
[00:07:12] Speaker C: There's no hair. There's no. There are no kind of other features. Is it the size of the hand? Is it the color? I mean what again, we can challenge our assumptions here about the.
[00:07:24] Speaker B: No, I think that's a really good point though. It's that, it's that thing. If I just defaulted to that and.
[00:07:28] Speaker C: Maybe it's because we have this very stick man in English which is now stick figure, but can kind of prime us to take something which is clearly ungendered and apply a kind of gender to it just by kind of habit, I suppose.
[00:07:43] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:07:44] Speaker B: And I think that is really interesting how looking at that, why we read images a certain way like that and where those assumptions are coming from.
[00:07:53] Speaker C: Also, I wonder if like if you looked at the first panel, if you would automatically kind of know there was something coming.
[00:08:00] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:08:01] Speaker C: So there's a lovely thing here about this. This whole idea of multi modal literacy is like we don't we do more than describe an image or process an image. We see an image as part of a, part of a carousel or part of a developing narrative, and we know there's more on the way.
And you could even say, well, what would come next?
[00:08:20] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah.
[00:08:21] Speaker C: Our students, to come up with the.
[00:08:23] Speaker E: Third image, grammar rules, what would you put?
[00:08:26] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
[00:08:28] Speaker B: Because I suppose so much, so much of memes and interacting with memes like this is relatability. It's about people already recognizing the format and knowing what's going to appear.
[00:08:39] Speaker E: And that's why we find it funny, isn't it? Because we can relate to it.
[00:08:43] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:08:45] Speaker F: I wonder if you change the lower, the little guy in the middle, if you change his eyes so that they're looking at english proficiency instead of looking backwards at grammar rules, does that change you? Does that, does it become a different meme then? Does it telling you something different then.
[00:09:00] Speaker C: Or even if you change the labels? So if me grammar rules and english proficiency change places in the two pictures, does that, does that convey a different message? And if so, what?
[00:09:10] Speaker B: Yeah, that's really interesting. English professionally stop in the ground.
[00:09:13] Speaker D: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:09:16] Speaker B: I'm gonna move us on to our next one.
[00:09:18] Speaker C: Yeah, we're overthinking.
[00:09:19] Speaker B: We've had a really, really interesting conversation about that, I think. And I think, I think this one, this next one speaks for itself, and it's, again, another one around, um, around english proficiency and the challenges.
[00:09:32] Speaker C: Who was a clever boy?
[00:09:34] Speaker F: I love girl.
For me, I think I'd change them around because I find listening actually really difficult. Listen. Listening isn't my calm one. I think. I think that the sort of the writing one and the listening one would swap for me.
[00:09:50] Speaker B: Okay, interesting.
[00:09:51] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:09:52] Speaker B: So for the listeners, what we've got is we've got four panels, and we've got a husky who is stood by a pool, starts and accidentally step into the pool and panic a little bit. The third pool, he's really panicking, or she's really panicking, falling into the water. And the fourth pool, she's in the water and she's terrified. And they're labeled listening, reading, writing, and speaking. So the implication being that each one is progressively more difficult. But I do think that's interesting, what you were saying there around.
[00:10:20] Speaker F: For me, reading is the easiest, then. Then listening, then writing and speaking.
[00:10:26] Speaker D: Yeah, probably.
[00:10:27] Speaker F: For me, writing would be the most difficult, although the one that panics me.
[00:10:32] Speaker C: Less because I've got my task here. If I'm doing this with students, if it's a kind of needs analysis, task. It's like, okay, make. Make your own meme with. With the skills and the husky here.
[00:10:42] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah.
[00:10:44] Speaker E: And if you think about, like, when I was teaching in the UK, you know, I would have multinational classes that I'd be working with. And so, you know, you could not say that this meme applied to all of the learners in the class. There were some learners who were very, very confident when it came to speaking, whether they were accurate or not, that's where their confidence lies. And then when it came to writing, that was not something that they were very well engaged with.
But also, for me, listening is the biggest challenge for me whenever I go to France, and I'm always trying to speak as much French as I can, but what I hear in return, it just goes straight over my head. But I think an element of that is me just automatically telling myself, you're not gonna understand what they say, and therefore, I'm not even allowing myself the opportunity to try and absorb and understand it. So, you know, it really depends on the learner type, doesn't it?
[00:11:50] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that is really interesting how looking at this one, something that's come up is so much of it is about, do I recognize this experience?
Because automatically everyone's looking at it and going, oh, no, those are in a different order. I find these things difficult in a different way. Whereas someone for whom that is the case will look at that and find it funny because they relate to it well.
[00:12:10] Speaker E: I like Ed's idea of, you know, using this as a kind of needs the diagnostics at the start of term.
[00:12:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:19] Speaker C: What's definitely evident here is that they're great conversation starters. And so for any kind of classroom task which is based on sharing ideas and putting your heads together, discussing what something might or might not indicate is using memes. Like, this is an ideal way to get started. I'm thinking now, is it like, is it on a boat or something? For example, it looks like the brakes have suddenly come on, and in the second picture, it's the force of breaking that has propelled the dog into the water again. It's like, did it fall or did it jump? There are all kinds of things here that are open to debate and open to discussion.
[00:12:58] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:12:58] Speaker C: The open endedness of it is what really makes it effective.
[00:13:01] Speaker F: Yeah, I love the eyes as well.
[00:13:03] Speaker E: Yeah, the eyes say it all.
[00:13:05] Speaker D: The steady path.
[00:13:05] Speaker F: You could also sort of get the other. What's the next picture? Yes.
[00:13:10] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:13:12] Speaker F: Is it a teacher pulling it?
[00:13:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that.
[00:13:15] Speaker E: What is the rescuer how are they labeled?
[00:13:18] Speaker C: Oh, I thought I would have presumed huskies liked water as well. So it's, again, it's. It's. It's leading me into kind of interesting questions rather than answers. And perhaps one thing about multimodal literacies is it's the. The ability to kind of harness and pursue questions rather than always trying to find answers to things.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense. And one of the things you were saying, ed, and I think this is, this is giving me an interesting thought, in that we've talked a lot about receptive tasks, but you mentioned a potential productive task of a needs analysis. But I think you can go beyond that to so many different kinds of productive tasks because, like, the meme template is giving you a certain template of information, of communicative information that you then add your own information over the top of. So I can. I can. I mean, none come to mind because I'm not a teacher, but I can think of so many. Like I mention, there are so many possibilities of different kinds of productive tasks where you could just go, here's a meme format. Write about x. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:14:18] Speaker C: It's. What's interesting is, is that just as with the traditional skills of literacy, effective writers have done lots of reading beforehand. Writing floats on a sea of reading. The same with memes. Like, you can get a meme wrong. You can make a meme that makes no sense at all, because it isn't true to the tradition of what that meme is about and what it means. So a student needs to have seen and laughed at dozens of versions of a certain meme in order to create an effective version of it for themselves.
[00:14:47] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:14:48] Speaker E: It can come down to culture a lot. Well, can't it? You know, it's, you know, a meme in Spain would probably be completely lost on me, because if it's, you know, referring to, I don't know, spanish politician or just, you know, what's known to be a kind of way of living in Spain, you know, having not lived in Spain myself, and I don't know anything about, you know, the politics out there, then it would be lost on me. And so I guess we have to consider that when sharing memes with our learners, are they going to understand the messaging, or is this something that, you know, we talk about, you know, areas of humour in English, like sarcasm? You know, sarcasm is quite a british thing and can be lost on other nationalities. And so, you know, if you've got a sarcastic meme, what's your learner gonna get from that? They're not gonna understand it. There's little purpose in having it.
I think that also ties into sort of, you know, video content as well. You know, I know someone who wants, you know, let their students watch an episode of Wallace and Gromit. And, you know, the poor students had absolutely no idea what was going on with the language that was being used. Very colloquial language.
And, you know, this obsession with cheese. And so I think there's a kind of, you know, sort of a cultural aspect that we have to take into account.
[00:16:32] Speaker F: Yeah. I mean, you know, that cultural aspect might be a positive thing that you can exploit if you. If the person wants to learn about the culture. But it can be something that turns very boring, you know, in that you have to explain everything. Then it's like explaining a joke. It's no longer funny, is it, if you have to explain it?
[00:16:51] Speaker B: And I suppose, sat here explaining memes.
[00:16:54] Speaker C: I think that what Charlotte said earlier might be in danger of getting comments like, I'm from Germany, and we don't understand sarcasm at all.
You were claiming it for Britain. But maybe that's a bold statement.
[00:17:08] Speaker E: I mean, yeah, obviously, you know, that's quite a sweeping statement to make.
[00:17:13] Speaker C: The cultural point is valid, though, for sure.
[00:17:15] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:17:16] Speaker E: But I think you can't make the assumption that everybody's gonna get it.
[00:17:21] Speaker B: No, no. And I suppose sarcasm in a different language is more difficult than sarcasm in your native language.
[00:17:26] Speaker C: That's a great point.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: I want to look at one last meme, which is a Drake meme. So Drake's a very common format where in the first panel, he's flinching away from something, and in the second panel, he's pointing to something else with a smile on his face. And here we have at the top learning English at school, and he's flinching away from it and watching english movies, which he's. Which he's enjoying, which I thought related a lot to this concept of multimodal literacy. So I thought this was a very interesting one.
[00:17:54] Speaker F: See, for me, this is one that's lost because I have no idea who Drake is.
[00:17:58] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:17:58] Speaker F: And it's the first time I've seen this one as well. So I'm sort of. Okay.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: See, that's interesting because I barely know who Drake is. I basically have no idea. I know he's a singer. That's about it. I hope he's a singer. I hope I've not got that wrong.
[00:18:13] Speaker C: It's great that we're down with the kids and relevant.
[00:18:15] Speaker B: I know, I know, I know.
But I know. This format so. Well, I see this all the time. So even though I have very, very little interaction with Drake's music, I know exactly what this is telling me.
[00:18:28] Speaker C: And arguably, you don't need to know who Drake is in order to appreciate it. And there are probably people in memes who nobody knows or very few people know who they are. And yet the non or the kind of non biographical kind of information there is so. Is so kind of compelling that we get what it is. Does he. Does he need to be famous? By the way, this is a question. Are all meme characters well known? Is that part of the deal with them?
[00:18:54] Speaker F: You can become famous, can't you, if you become a meme, but probably not something you want to be famous for. But because there are people who have become famous memes who are now trying to live it down, aren't they? Yeah, but for me, the thing is that in the picture underneath, he doesn't even look that happy. So I didn't. My initial reaction was that he didn't really look that happy either.
[00:19:19] Speaker B: That's interesting. That's interesting.
[00:19:22] Speaker C: You have to. And again, as a student, you would have to have seen enough of these memes to understand how they work. They're never ironic or sarcastic. They're always to be understood literally. Right. Don't like learning English at school. Love watching english movies. It's always that simple.
[00:19:36] Speaker E: It's always face value.
[00:19:37] Speaker C: Always face value.
And having that kind of. Maybe. Maybe it's actually the right hand side of this meme, which is more in. Contains more information than the left hand side.
[00:19:47] Speaker B: And.
[00:19:48] Speaker C: Oh, I understand the text here, so. Oh, now I can decipher those pictures. He must be happy in the bottom picture because watching english movies is way better than learning English at school.
[00:19:59] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:19:59] Speaker E: And he clearly doesn't like the top one. Learning English at school is definitely something that he's.
[00:20:05] Speaker C: So that's a reversal of how it normally works. We normally have an image to support the information contained in a text. And here, arguably, in Nick's case, you've got the text helping to make sense of the image.
[00:20:16] Speaker F: The hand gestures are interesting as well, aren't they? Yeah, because they're there. I mean, particularly the top one is by no means universal, is it?
[00:20:24] Speaker D: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:20:25] Speaker B: I'm wondering how much in this. This, again, there's gonna be people listening in the audience going, you. You're missing the point here. I'm wondering whether the actual music video behind this is bringing some information to it as well, because in the music video, he's flinching away from something, whereas I'm wondering whether that's. That's a thread here, or are we.
[00:20:49] Speaker E: Just massively over analyzing it?
[00:20:51] Speaker B: We could also be massively over analyzing it, or we're very much missing something, which all the Drake fans are going, no, this is the point in this.
[00:20:57] Speaker E: Yeah, quite possibly, actually.
[00:20:59] Speaker C: And then once a meme is out there, it's. It.
The origin. The origin of it becomes less relevant. So it kind of loses its original power as it. As it mutates and shifts and is used in various different contexts, but then.
[00:21:13] Speaker B: Takes on different power, I suppose, through the process of being shared like this. I think a lot of the meaning is just from it being so.
So ever present. Like, it just gets shared so much that people who don't necessarily know the original have encountered it enough times that it gets that kind of iterative meaning.
[00:21:34] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:21:35] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:21:36] Speaker B: Wonderful. Well, thank you for taking a deep dive into memes and meme culture with me, and I'm gonna move us on to our next topic, which. Which hopefully is a little more straightforward.
[00:21:50] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to this episode of talking ELT, the easiest place to learn about the big issues in language teaching. Don't forget to like and subscribe if you want to learn more about this issue and others like it. You can also get practical resources and.
[00:22:06] Speaker B: More advice on this topic by downloading our position paper. Just follow the link in the description.
