Bite-sized language teaching in the digital wild: Relational pedagogy and micro-celebrity English teachers on Instagram

Abstract

While ‘social media influencers’ have predominantly been studied in marketing and advertising, there has been an increase in language teachers' engagement in content creation on social media platforms. Informed by the principles of relational pedagogy (Kern, 2015, 2018), the present study explores how a group of Turkish teachers of English (n = 10) each with over 100,000 followers on Instagram navigate around the material, social, and individual multimodal semiotic resources to create English language teaching content. The data sources which include reels from teachers' public accounts and netnographic fieldwork notes were analyzed informed by the principles of social semiotics (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001). The findings revealed that the teachers create digital artefacts relying on creative relationships between words, contexts, and situations and provide opportunities to practice simple conversations, learn vocabulary in context, and distinguish nuances in the pronunciation of challenging words. The multimodal meaning-making practices demonstrate how social, material, and individual affordances shape, reframe, or recontextualize linguistic meanings in various forms. These findings highlight the facilitative power of social media for noticing linguistic forms, interaction, participation, and multimodal communication with important implications for teacher education, identity, and professional development in the evolving landscape of language teaching in the digital wild.