'Memerizing' Language Learning: Educational Connotation of Image-Macro Memes

This paper reports on an experimental study regarding a novel application of image-macro memes, or those highly dynamic multimodal compositions that propagate online, mostly for humorous purposes. Their popularity and areas of application are increasing, and these text types now represent an important part of human community and social life. And yet, despite their transformation into a “mainstream phenomenon”, memes still deserve more recognition from scholars. For these reasons, this article focuses on a case study elaborated at the University of Salento, which is meant to introduce an adaptation of the multimodal composition of image- macro memes for didactic purposes. In the first part of this research, a number of Italian undergraduate students of foreign languages and literatures produced a corpus of memes that were presented, in the second phase, to three groups of high-school students. In the subjects‟ creations, the distinguishing features of image-macro memes, such as the particular interaction between pictures and words, the adaptation of the conventional oppositions between „possible/impossible‟, or „expected/unexpected‟ cognitive scripts, or the representations of culture-bound pop icons, are exploited to help recipients learn the appropriate pronunciation of English words, as well as the meaning of some false friends. After illustrating the multimodal composition of the memes under analysis, this paper enquires into the high-school students‟ reception. They were asked to interpret the multimodal composition of the memes and, then, to evaluate their educational potential.