The potential of using creolized texts in teaching languages to foreign students (demonstrated on Internet memes)

Abstract

One of the challenges facing a modern foreign language teacher is both a relatively low level of initial language training of educational migrants and their low motivation in studying the entire system of a foreign language and their involvement in the educational process. One of the ways to solve this problem is the system of working on creolized texts. The creolized text (also called the polycode, or multimodal text) as a type of text that combines verbal and iconic information, is familiar to modern students from different countries, and fits into the world postmodern reality. Most often, creolized texts are spoken of in the analysis of advertising products, posters, or film texts. At the same time, for foreign language teachers, the use of polycode texts is by no means a novelty: you can at least name cards, posters, illustrations, picture dictionaries, and other means used at the initial stage. These verbal-iconic means have proven their unconditional effectiveness both in explaining lexical and grammatical material and in reinforcing what has been learned. Reading a creolized text allows for the transition from text to meaning: such an algorithm allows an applicant for higher education to comprehensively use reception, memory, intelligence, and activate speech-thinking processes in a foreign language. One of the most glowing functional types of creolized texts today is the meme – a special kind of multimodal text, closely welded verbal and iconic components that have a basic set of features: repeatability, comicality, recognizability, relevance. The use of memes in teaching foreign languages is an important way to increase the motivation of educational migrants to study, to establish intercultural communication, to form students’ linguistic and cultural competence, to facilitate the processes of adaptation and socialization in the new reality. Such texts may well become one of the sources of information about the national and cultural characteristics of a foreign country and its native speakers.