ABSTRACT

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.

part I|74 pages

The language of pop culture and language skills areas

chapter 3|21 pages

Swear/taboo words in US TV series

Combining corpus linguistics with selected insights from screenwriters and learners

part II|78 pages

Pop culture and classroom practice

chapter 6|14 pages

Going beyond the surface with pop culture

Using humorous cartoon series to explore social issues in the foreign language classroom

chapter 7|15 pages

Political comics and cartoons in language education

Suggestions for Arabic as a Foreign Language in classrooms in the USA

chapter 9|16 pages

Learning through sharing

Enhancing critical engagement with popular culture content using social media in a second language context

part III|57 pages

Beyond the classroom

part IV|42 pages

Sociocultural and culture-critical considerations

chapter 16|12 pages

The new normal

English language learning, pop culture, and the politics of investment