While browsing social media, you may have seen these videos of influencers teaching you tips for learn a foreign language or explain grammar points to you. This is what it does Athena Solfor example, literature teacher with millions of subscribers, who mainly focuses on explaining linguistic facts in French.
The phenomenon is far from marginal. Like Athéna Sol, many K-12 teachers, as well as freelancers, present their work on social media. In addition, the use of the term “influencer” has exploded since the 2010swhich confirms the vitality of these digital montages.
As a student or student, what can you expect from the videos and other interactive content that is offered? And, more generally, how these uses are asked language learning ?
Varied teacher profiles and content
These influencer teachers have very varied profiles. This diversity leads to equally diverse ways of using and posting content on social media.
professor And professor – not to be confused – they are both English teachers, but they differ in the way they use social media. Mr. Prof (around 400,000 subscribers on X) has mainly documented, through a book and soon a comic, his resignation from National Education. With his cumulative number of over one million subscribers across multiple platforms, Monsieur Prof would in turn “enough to revolutionize language teaching”estimates France 3 Occitanie.
On TikTok or Instagram, this teacher offers different types of content: footage of a classroom situation, language rules, all interspersed with more personal life moments. It highlights a “playful” approach and a a certain closeness with his students. Inspired by American models, he says on RTL that he wants to highlights the teaching profession.
On the Belgian side, Mr. Nash promotes the teaching of Dutch through “hyper-paced” videos. Based on his social impact, he created his own virtual training courses. For the newspaper Freedom ofhis approach is “enough to make people jealous in the poorly ventilated classrooms of Brussels and Wallonia”.
Other more private profiles such as Charlenepromotes his language business through short and unifying content about the life of a freelance French as a foreign language teacher. There are also many teachers taking advantage of social media for practical learning tips, as reported in Café du FLEa French as a foreign language news site.
A linguistic and didactic analysis of their content
Social media and influencers have the ability to reach a large audience. This dissemination requires accountability for their words and the methods they disseminate.
If, in most cases, the production of such content it doesn't allow you to get paidsome teachers take advantage of this to promote partnerships, highlight products – books, apps, teaching methods or simply increase their views. The informative genre thus yields, more or less explicitly, to the desire for marketing. Thus, this educational content in languages with (in)direct promotional purposes may raise at least three types of cautions.
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First, they regularly highlight a 'fun' and 'original' approach in opposition to traditional school language learning caricatured as 'boring' and 'ineffective', reminiscent of advertising techniques.
Although it is recognized that play, i.e. the integration of play into learning, can have a positive impact, it requires preconditions to ensure that to play is to learn according to Francisco Jiménez, Spanish professor-researcher. The research specifically talks about serious gaming, even if the term is up for debate as reported by Laurence Schmollbecause it reinforces the boundary between useful and useless in learning.
It is not enough to pretend to be playful in order to learn to be truly playful. Also, the proposed activities are rarely original compared to the diversity of practices studied in language teaching.
Then, if, for certain influencers, filming in the classroom may raise ethical questions – even if the students are never visible – focusing the camera on the influencer teacher helps to attribute it, as well as “in his words”. , a role model.
This can start by highlighting the “native” teacher, as is the case with the TikTok account French encore (700,000 subscribers) offering “Improve your French with a native teacher”. However, as we are reminded John M. Levis and colleagueslinguistics researchers, there is really no hierarchy between the contributions of a so-called “native” teacher and those of a “non-native” teacher at the level that students eventually reach, for example in pronunciation.
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It's also important to step back from some of the educational choices in these videos posted online. Thus, on the occasion of the launch of Mr. Prof.'s book entitled Let's speak EnglishFlorent Moncomble, professor-researcher in English linguistics, reacted to some of the prescriptions made, particularly the statement that “95% of verbs are regular! So when in doubt, put an -ED on the end.” Based on a corpus analysis explained in his thread aboutthe researcher demonstrates that in terms of frequency of use, irregular verbs are overrepresented (to be, to have, to sayetc.).
Natalie Kübler, among other linguistic researchers, explains the need to rely linguistic corpus to infer linguistic functioning from real data. Also, should we teach what is most common in the language or most used by its speakers in contexts?
What impact on language teaching?
In a society dominated by attention economysocial networks can guide ways of doing and thinking. This influence can be positive, by promoting the entire linguistic diversity through stories which make little-known or even minoritized accents or languages to be heard. Social networks are also powerful channels of discourse, as we have recalled Julien Longhiuniversity professor in applied linguistics.
However, this influence can be even more insidious. First, influencers tend to produce discourses of diluted authority, as has been studied for influential doctors. These discourses of authority can encourage certain decision-making biases, such as the availability heuristic, which causes us to overestimate the importance of information that is directly accessible to us.
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The linguist Dominique Maingueneau reminds us that, in expressing himself, “every speaker necessarily activates in the interpreter the construction of a certain representation of himself, which he must strive to control.” Inspired by this concept of the discursive ethosresearchers note that influential teachers use a restricted set of enunciative codes generating engagement from their audience. In 2023, FranceTV also asked about the impact tiktoker speeches have on school can have on young people.
If it is difficult to measure the direct influence of online video producers on educational practices, the language sciences invite us to consider that the very format of the content reinforces biases. These can affect how families perceive what language teaching and the role of teachers should be – and possibly lead them to challenge the pedagogies implemented in the classroom or to learn grammar rules that are not very functional in the classroom (potentially penalized in the classroom) .
Beyond the undeniably humorous nature of these videos, the goal is to shed light on daily teaching innovations in the field and to remind the role of research in language teaching to measure the actual effect of a system on language learning.