English language learning and social media: Schematic learning on Kpop Stan twitter

Abstract

The recent years have observed a notable rise in online activities and interactions. One of the popular online interaction zones are fandom communities comprising fans of any artist, band, TV show, movie, book, and so on. These fans come together on various platforms to enthuse about their favorites with people who share their admiration and interests. One such platform is Twitter and the fandom community is Stan Twitter. Within those fandoms, K-Pop fandom stands out because of the density of English as a second or foreign language speakers in this community. Taking this community as its sample, this study explores the ways in which the non-native English speaking fandom members use English to communicate on this platform. Moreover, the study focuses on the interpretation and usage of meme discourse by these non-native English speaking members. The findings reveal that the fandom members learn memetic discourse by internalizing it in the form of schemas, which means that they learn the whole chunk of interaction rather than learning individual words. The study has also explored overall language-learning within this community, and has discussed the implications of fandom activities as potential learning aids.