On October 9, 2019, President of the United States, Donald Trump, wrote a letter to the President of the Republic of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, expressing concerns and sharing his advice on the situation in Turkey. What version of this letter do you want to read? English? Turkish? I suggest grabbing the one floating around social media. It is simple, fun, and without the need for interpretation. It was written in a universal language: emojis!
A picture is worth a thousand words. When it comes to communicating with people from different cultures, that picture can be an emotional icon, called an emoticon, or a small pictograph of a face or object, called an emoji.
According to research conducted by Michelle Wylie of Yeungnam University of South Korea, they are indeed worth a thousand words. At the 2019 International Virtual Exchange Conference (IVEC), Wylie shared her findings on the important role of paralinguistic features that included: single or multiple exclamation marks, emoticons, emojis, multiple full stops, and multiple question marks. While coding the messages exchanged between 21 students from a Korean University and 25 students from a British University in a semester long program, Wylie found that the most frequently occurring category was paralinguistic features. Even though the intensity of usage varies in every student, emojis and the other paralinguistic signs were consistently used by both groups of students to soften statements, add explanation, and as a result, build rapport between Korean and British students. According to Wylie, one British student who only used two paralinguistic signs during the entire semester was described by his Korean teammates in the final survey as cold, unfriendly, and hard to communicate with.
Wylie’s research also found that the groups who opted to use a platform other than the online forum in the course site communicated more; these groups also used more paralinguistic features than those that stayed in the online discussion forum. This points out the impact of communication platforms and the importance of giving students the freedom to choose them. A self-selected social media platform such as WhatApp or Facebook gave students a sense of comfort. It put them in a non-school-like environment to talk with their classmates in the same way they talk with their friends.
Another finding Wylie shared was that more paralinguistic signs were used in non-educational topics, such as self-introductions and intercultural interviews. These “relaxed” topics put students in the mood for self-expression and to share their life views or life experiences. They were able to use emojis to inject humor, alter tone, foster friendship and dissolve disharmony.
Such emojis, emoticons, and paralinguistic signs carry the mission of providing non-verbal communication cues behind the screen, which have become so critical in this day and age that young people feel incapable to communicate without them. This explained the awkward scene in my household: a group of boys sitting in the same room chatting with one another through text messaging! I once asked my 14-year-old why they couldn’t just talk to each other, his answer was, “I don’t want to wink for real.” $#@&%!
As I am preparing for another year of teaching a Global Learning Experience course, I jot down this lighthearted note to my students with the help of emojis ;-)
