Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Memes: Learning, Bonding, And Emotional Support In Times Of Covid-19, Valentina Vinokurova

Russian Language Journal

The COVID-19 pandemic has created various challenges for language teachers. For instance, the online teaching/learning environment makes it difficult to create peer-to-peer relations in the classroom and to engage students in learning (in or outside of class). Furthermore, many students today have difficulties focusing on school assignments because they are emotionally affected by the pandemic. This paper proposes that memes can be part of the answer to these issues. Memes, a new internet genre, typically involve a witty juxtaposition of image and text that expresses their creators’ emotions about a widely relatable situation. This paper discusses a pedagogical innovation in …