Pop Culture in Language Education: Theory, Research, Practice

Abstract

Pop culture has long been permeating many aspects of daily life in contemporary society. In the language education context, teachers consciously or unconsciously make use of materials from pop culture in the foreign language (e.g. films, television series, novels, and music) when planning, developing, and enacting their language teaching. Learners at different ages naturally access a large amount of pop culture in foreign languages through mass media. This phenomenon echoes what Awad Ibrahim, in his chapter in this book, calls ‘the new normal’ (p. 258). However, the potential for pop culture in language education has, as Werner and Tegge put it in their introduction, been ‘underused and underresearched’ (p. 3). A reader approaching this book is likely to have the following questions: (1) What are the boundaries of pop culture in language education? (2) Why is pop culture used in language education? (3) How should we choose proper materials from pop culture and integrate them into foreign language education? The book comprehensively answers these questions from both theoretical and practical perspectives.