While browsing social media, you may have seen these videos of teacher influencers giving you advice on learn a foreign language or explain grammar points to you. This is what Athena Solfor example, a literature professor with millions of subscribers, who mainly focuses on explaining linguistic facts in French.
The phenomenon is far from marginal. Like Athena Sol, many primary and secondary school teachers, as well as freelancers, present their work on social networks. Moreover, The use of the term “influencer” has exploded since the 2010swhich confirms the vitality of these digital productions.
As a student or learner, what can we expect from the videos and other interactive content that are thus offered? And, more generally, how do these uses raise questions? language learning ?
Varied profiles of teachers and content
These influential teachers have very varied profiles. This diversity leads to equally diverse modes of use and content posted on social networks.
Mr. Prof. et Mr. Prof. – not to be confused – are both English teachers but differ in the way they use social networks. Monsieur le Prof (about 400k subscribers on X) has mainly documented, through a book and soon a comic strip, his resignation from the National Education system. With his cumulative followers of more than a million on several platforms, Monsieur Prof would have, for his part, “enough to revolutionize language teaching”estimates France 3 Occitanie.
On TikTok or Instagram, this teacher offers different types of content: filming in a classroom situation, rules on the language, all interspersed with moments of more personal life. He highlights a “playful” approach and a certain proximity with his students. Inspired by American models, he stated on RTL that he hoped to use this means highlight the teaching profession.
On the Belgian side, Mr. Nash promotes the teaching of Dutch through “hyper-rhythmic” videos. Thanks to its social impact, it has created its own virtual training courses that are paid for. For the newspaper The Freehis approach is “enough to make people jealous in the poorly ventilated classrooms of Brussels and Wallonia”.
Other more confidential profiles, such as Charlenepromote their language business through short and engaging content on the life of an independent French as a foreign language teacher. There are also many teachers who take advantage of social networks for practical learning advice, as reported by FLE Cafea news site for French as a foreign language.
A linguistic and didactic analysis of their contents
Social networks and influencers have the ability to reach a large audience. This diffusion calls for responsibility for their words and the methods they disseminate.
If, in the majority of cases, the production of such content does not allow you to get paidsome teachers take advantage of this to promote partnerships, highlight products – books, applications, teaching methods or simply increase their number of views. The informative genre therefore gives way, more or less explicitly, to marketing intentions. Thus, these educational contents in languages with a (in)directly promotional aim can raise at least three types of precautions.
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First of all, they regularly put forward a “fun” and “original” approach in opposition to traditional school language learning, caricatured as “boring” and “ineffective”, reminiscent of advertising techniques.
While it is recognized that playfulness, 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, a teacher-researcher in Spanish. The research speaks in particular of serious games, even if the term is the subject of debate as Laurence Schmoll relatessince it reinforces the boundary between the useful and the futile in learning.
It is not enough to claim the playful side for learning to be truly playful. Moreover, the activities proposed are rarely original when compared to the diversity of practices studied in language teaching.
Then, if, for some influencers, filming in class can raise ethical questions – even if the students are never visible – the fact of focusing the camera on the teacher influencer contributes to attributing to him, as well as to his words, a modeling role.
This can start with highlighting the “native” teacher as is the case with the TikTok account encorefrenchlesson (700k subscribers) which offers to “Level up your Frenchness with a native teacher”. However, as we are reminded John M. Levis and his colleagueslinguistics researchers, there is in reality no hierarchy between the contributions of a so-called “native” teacher and those of a “non-native” teacher on the level that students ultimately reach, for example in pronunciation.
Also read: Should we speak English forever to teach it well?
It is also important to take a step back from certain educational choices in these videos posted online. Thus, on the occasion of the release of Monsieur Prof’s book entitled Let’s speak EnglishFlorent Moncomble, a teacher-researcher in English linguistics, reacted to some of the prescriptions made, in particular the statement that “95% of verbs are regular! So, when in doubt, put an -ED at the end”. Based on a corpus analysis explained in his thread on Xthe researcher demonstrates that in terms of frequency of use, irregular verbs are over-represented (to be, to have, to sayetc.).
Natalie Kübler, among other linguistic researchers, explains the need to rely on language corpus to infer linguistic functions from real data. Also, should we teach what is most frequent in the language or most used by its speakers depending on the contexts?
What impact on language teaching?
In a society dominated by the attention economysocial networks can influence ways of doing and thinking. This influence can be positive, by promoting all linguistic diversity through stories which make accents or languages heard that are not widely spoken, or even in the minority. Social networks are also strong channels of discourse, as recalled Julien Longhiuniversity professor of applied linguistics.
However, this influence can also be more insidious. First, influencers tend to produce discourses of diluted authority as has been studied for influential doctorsThese authoritative discourses can encourage certain decision-making biases such as the availability heuristic which leads us to overestimate the importance of the information which is directly accessible to us.
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Linguist Dominique Maingueneau reminds us that when expressing themselves, “every speaker necessarily activates in the interpreter the construction of a certain representation of themselves, which they must strive to control.” Inspired by this concept of discursive ethosresearchers find that influential teachers use a restricted set of enunciative codes generating engagement from their audience. In 2023, FranceTV was also wondering about the impact of tiktoker speeches on schools can have on young people.
While it is difficult to measure the direct influence of online video producers on teaching practices, language sciences invite us to think that the very format of the content reinforces biases. These can affect the way in which families perceive what language teaching should be and the role of teachers – and possibly lead them to challenge the teaching methods implemented in class or to learn grammar rules that are not very functional in real language practice (potentially penalized in class).
Beyond the undeniable humorous nature of these videos, the aim is to shed light on everyday teaching innovations in the field and to recall the role of research in language teaching in measuring the real effect of a system on language learning.
