Foundations Newsletter

If you’re a smartphone user, you should be by default familiar with emoji, or as older people like to call them: smiley faces.  Emoji, as reported in a recent BBC article, has become so widely spread in our daily written conversations that it is considered “the fastest growing language in the UK.” Don’t believe me? Take a look at the report yourself: UK’s fastest growing language is… emoji 

Another report supports that finding and says that more than 90% of internet useres are basically emoji users. And, looking at our students’ conversations and online written submissions, one can see how important it is that we become familiar with what these different emojis mean and how we can probably use them to add a nice touch to our teaching.

You can, for example, start your Sunday class by asking students to tell you about their weekends using one emoji, and maybe on sentence? You can also ask them by the end of a lesson to use an emoji to show you how they feel about the lesson:

-> they understood it well

-> they need more help

😕 -> they are not sure

You can also develop an interesting multi-stage activity by asking one group of students to write a 10-sentence story using emoji, only. Then, pass this emoji story to another group and ask them to decode it into ten sentences, using words only. And, you might add that the more words they use from their vocabulary list, the better their chances of winning are. Then, to laugh it off, compare both versions of the story and see how close (or not) both groups were.

How to add an emoji keyboard to your iPad/iPhone

Do you have any other ideas? –add a comment and share