Refashioning linguistic expertise: Translanguaging TESOL in social media

Abstract

This article examines the performative reconfiguration of linguistic expertise and the mode of TESOL at the intersection of language teaching, networked technology, and the culture of ludification. Applying van Dijck and Alinejad’s (2020 ‘Social media and trust in scientific expertise: Debating the COVID-19 pandemic in The Netherlands’, Social Media + Society, 6/4) distinction of institutional versus networked models of communication, it addresses the shifting ecology of foreign language education in an age of digital platforms in which linguistic expertise is no longer the exclusive preserve of institutional establishments, but rather can be claimed or self-professed by individuals operating on the basis of multiplex networks. A case example of networked TESOL in social media is presented to explore how the affordances of the networked model give rise to a radically different teacher-student dynamic than in the standard classroom, speaking to the idea of translanguaging pedagogy. The article discusses the implications of networked TESOL for theory and practice in applied linguistics in the post-multilingual era, proposing the idea of ludic literacy, where the instructor-influencer’s persona tends toward the performative and the sardonic, and where resources are flexibly orchestrated across the boundaries of languages, modes, and media.

Introduction

This article examines the performative reconfiguration of linguistic expertise and the mode of TESOL at the intersection of language teaching, networked technology, and the culture of ludification. We begin with a curious episode of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), in which a US-based teacher of Chinese descent instructs a Chinese student on oral English, focusing on pronunciation.¹ In what appears to be a typical classroom setup, the teacher (T), holding a stylus pen, points to a digital screen with the sentence ‘Stop laughing at me!’ The student (S) is instructed to read the sentence and does so with a choppy, hyperbolic accent.

• T: [in Cantonese] You sound like a turtle—stop-pu, stop-pu, stop-pu. [T shrugs his shoulders three times to mimic a turtle bobbing its head while imitating S’s pronunciation of ‘stop’ with a hyper-aspirated ‘p’.]

• [S laughs.]

• T: [in Mandarin] This won’t do. Read after me. [T reads the sentence in a remarkably strong American accent.]

• S: [in Mandarin] Wow, that sounds really native.

• T: [in Mandarin] Let me teach you a simple technique. [T swipes the screen. A new version of the same sentence appears, in which the ‘p’ in ‘stop’ and ‘t’ in ‘at’ are struck off in red; ‘laughing’ is replaced by the Chinese characters 拉粉.]

• T: [in Mandarin]: First, how did you pronounce this word just now? [T points to the word ‘stop’ on the screen.]

• S: Stop-pu.

• T: [in Cantonese] That sounds cringy! [In Mandarin] Remove the ‘p’ and read it as ‘stop’ [unaspirated ‘p’].

• [S reads ‘stop’ with an unaspirated ‘p’ to T’s approval.]

• T: [in Mandarin] Second, how did you pronounce this word just now? [T points to the word ‘laughing’ on the screen.]

• S: Laugh-ing [with an emphatic -ing.]

• T: [cringing] There’s no feel [using the Cantonese word mou5 for ‘without’ and the English word ‘feel’]. [In Mandarin] Change it directly to la-fen [the Mandarin pronunciation of 拉粉, which substitute ‘laughing’ in the new version of the sentence on the screen.]

• S: [in Mandarin] La-fen? My breakfast? [S is amused because la fen means rice rolls in Mandarin.]

• T: [in Mandarin] Get serious. Third, what’s this? [T points to the word ‘at’ on the screen.]

• S: At-te [with a hyper-aspirated ‘t’]

• T: [in Cantonese] You can’t read like that! [Cringes] [In Mandarin]: Remove the ‘t’. What do we have now?

• [S reads ‘at’ with an unaspirated ‘t’ to T’s approval.]

• T: [in Mandarin] Now apply the three techniques and read the sentence again. Three-Two-One.

• [S reads.]

• S: [in Mandarin] Wow, I sound different! [S covers her mouth in disbelief.]

• T: [in Mandarin] See? Don’t you sound more native now?

This mock scenario, staged for a social media audience across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, is as complex as it is atypical. It raises important questions about the shifting ecology of TESOL in an age of digital platforms, in which private entrepreneurship, operating on the basis of multiplex networks, runs alongside institutional structures of education (Curran and Jenks 2023; Ho 2023; Aslan 2024; Nejadghanbar, Song and Hu 2024). There is a refreshing dynamic of language teaching and learning here that goes against the grain of the usual TESOL classroom. We witness a significant interchange of resources from several languages: the subject matter is a rudimentary English sentence; the teacher and student interact in Mandarin for the most part; and, interestingly, colloquial Cantonese comes in at four points in the dialogue when the teacher expresses disapproval of the student’s pronunciation—even though the student does not appear to be a Cantonese user. These expressions of disapproval are couched in forms that would come across as excessive in the traditional classroom. For example, the teacher criticises the student’s pronunciation as ‘cringy’ (juk6 syun1), as having ‘without feel’ (‘mou5 feel’, here meaning non-native), and compares her misreading of ‘stop’ as stop-pu to the rhythm of a turtle bobbing its head in what may be called an intersemiotic mimicry. All of this is accompanied by dramatic body language and facial expression on the teacher’s part; and this intense embodiment is integral to the pedagogy described here. But not only are these Cantonese-and-body expressions not perceived as patronizing or condescending, they become a source of benign humour, and this is attested by the student’s amusement throughout the conversation. This, as we will see, can be attributed to a broader ludic (playful) culture enhanced by digital modalities. With respect to the word ‘laughing’, two Chinese characters la fen are used to substitute the English syllables (la = [læ]; fen = [fɪŋ]). Note that the choice of characters is predicated on Mandarin, the student’s first language; if read in Cantonese or other Chinese topolect, the characters would lose their heuristic value for pronouncing the English word. But the two characters, invoked for their sound, also form the Chinese word for ‘rice roll’ that becomes yet another point of humour in the interaction—although the teacher at this point demands tongue-in-cheek that the student ‘get serious’, as if he were not already unserious himself. Finally, one should note that the sentence in question, ‘Stop laughing at me!’ has an ironic metadiscursive ring to it as part of the design of this exchange, for the very manner in which the student is taught to read this sentence is precisely meant to provoke laughter from the audience.

This video skit illustrates a central point we want to make in this article: that linguistic expertise in the age of social media is no longer the exclusive preserve of institutional establishments; it can be claimed or self-professed by individuals and marketed as a form of online commodity. In the critical social sciences, knowledge has been understood as a form of fictitious commodity (Jessop 2007). Hence Bill Fischer’s (2015) pronouncement of ‘the end of expertise’ where everyone can nowadays be an expert in technology and analytics, and London Times columnist Richard Morrison’s concern that ‘the decline and fall of the expert in public esteem strikes me as the most significant aspect in which the twenty-first century thus far differs from the twentieth’ (cited in Bawden 2009: n.p.). In the context at hand, legitimate expertise as far as language education is concerned is traditionally determined by top-down criteria of evaluation that usually leads to some form of certification: the expert is s/he who has earned an accreditation according to certain recognized standards. This institutional model is of course still relevant in today’s educational landscape. But with the platformisation of modern society (van Dijk et al., 2018), expertise has at the same time become a rhizomatic—that is, non-linear and proliferative—construct. It is performed into being in cyberspace by individuals from the bottom up by curating the requisite skills and knowledge in a particular domain, for instance, in teaching English language as a foreign language. The new rule thus becomes: the expert is s/he who can command a sizeable social media following, traffic, and reach based on online content.

As with all things in modern society, TESOL has been subject to commodification; it has become an industry in social media. With this, an alternative model of communicating linguistic expertise has arisen alongside the traditional model. In this alternative model, individuals who may or may not have received formal institutional recognition—for instance, a TESOL qualification—can nonetheless claim legitimacy as language experts by way of strategically positioning themselves as such on social media networks (Curran and Jenks 2023; see also Baker and Rojek 2020 for a general discussion of claiming and constructing expertise online). With this levelling of the traditional threshold to claiming linguistic expertise, any individual is free to style themselves into a language expert among invisible others through the affordances of social media. The language teacher effectively becomes a microcelebrity or influencer, one who continuously performs by way of content generation to sustain the impression—perhaps even the illusion—of proficiency. In other words, the presentation of self on the part of the online language teacher is different by virtue of what social media affords (Jones and Hafner 2021: 212–217) and governed by their entrepreneurial motive. This changes the entire game of language teaching along with all the assumptions and conventions associated with the physical classroom. Because the attention economy of social networks is such that any number of channels are always competing to capture and retain audiences at any one time (Bucher 2012), self-made language experts are constantly compelled to create their own niche by packaging their online content ‘outside the box’, as it were. This logic of networked platforms facilitates practices that challenge and transcend boundaries and categories hitherto thought to be determinative, notably the boundaries between named languages.

In the following sections, we first explain the institutional and networked models, starting with existing work in scientific communication and then applying it to TESOL. We then analyse a case example of TESOL in social media to explore how the affordances of the networked model give rise to a radically different teacher-student dynamic than in the standard classroom, speaking to the idea of translanguaging pedagogy (Li 2023). This leads into a discussion of what we describe as the ludification of literacy in social media where the instructor’s persona tends toward the performative and the sardonic, and where resources are flexibly orchestrated across the boundaries of languages, modes, and media. The implications of the study for theory and practice in applied linguistics will be drawn out in the conclusion.

TESOL: Institutions versus networks

In an article on how governments distribute information and engage the public during the COVID-19 pandemic, van Dijck and Alinejad (2020) propose two generic models of communication differentiated along the parameters of whom (to trust), what (to trust), and how (trust is fostered): the institutional model and the networked model. The two models are structurally distinct and operate on different premises; but each has its place in contemporary communication. The institutional model is a technocratic approach to communication that begins with persons endowed with certain expertise—for instance, the scientists at the forefront of analysing new viruses—who are trusted to have authoritative access to knowledge in virtue of their educational qualification, professional membership, and field experience. This trust in experts—the aspect of whom—is an institutional one based on attested methods for evaluating and accrediting competence, such as through advanced assessments and industry placements. Precisely what is being trusted varies with the subject matter in question, but by and large the material communicated would be instrumental in nature; it is no-nonsense, prim-and-proper. As far as science is concerned, these are the facts and data derived from empirical observations and experimental testing, and subject to logical interpretation and extrapolation. Finally, how trust is built pertains to the tools and systems of communicating expert know-how to non-experts. In science, this would involve the presentation and explanation of facts and data using a range of tools that proffer a façade of neat rationality, among which statistics, graphs, and charts would figure prominently. PowerPoint and spreadsheets are quintessential mediums for this purpose. All of this gives rise to a model of communication that is typically top-down and unidirectional—going from experts to non-experts via policymakers and the news media—as well as instrumental and streamlined.

By contrast, the networked model of communication is one that taps into the ‘centrifugal force’ of social media, giving rise to a non-hierarchical dynamics of information exchange (van Dijck and Alinejad 2020: 3). Social media is centrifugal because it de-centres the source of knowledge and information into a multitude of resources. In this model, so-called experts are no longer the privileged purveyor of knowledge and information, as a plenitude of non-expert voices (the whom) ‘gain clout through messages and videos they post and also through the automated likes, shares, retweets, and recommendations pushed by platforms; “friends” and nonexperts seem to be qualified to communicate scientific information on par with institutions or expert’ (3). Indeed the boundary between expert and non-expert becomes porous, as expertise in this age of connectivity and liquidity is not exclusively an institutionalized construct. Rather it can be claimed (as well as abandoned) by individuals through their prosumption in social media where content creators consume the media products circulated by others and by themselves. The evaluation of expertise in this context is based not on stable institutional criteria but on the volume of subscriptions, likes, and shares, subject to constant fluctuation. The expert qua expert is defined not by the establishment in a particular field or industry, but through an individual’s capacity to engage a virtual following, and to this extent the self-professed expert is potentially a microcelebrity or influencer in social media. Drawing on the affordances of networking and crowdsourcing, this model is characterized by multidirectional flows of not just facts and data (although these are not precluded), but also affects and experiences (the what); and these non-expert emotions and sentiments impact ‘the information cycle in real time’ through the Internet’s algorithmic logic (3). This networked model compromises the top-down structure, unidirectionality, and instrumentality of communication characteristic of the institutional model, and opens up the discursive space to the simultaneous exchange between and amongst diverse actors and stakeholders, including non-expert participants, the news media, policymakers, and the experts. As regards the how, trust in networked environments is engendered through a triangulation of things like postings, photos, memes, feed updates, interactive stickers, and ‘stories’ (videos or images) across Instagram, Snapchat, X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook. These platforms form the material basis for a participatory and convergence culture in which information is remediated any number of times across complex networks of knowledge communities (Jenkins 2006). This encourages a proliferation of contesting voices across languages, modes, and media that extends beyond the rubric of institutionally endorsed metrics.

Comparing the two models of communication, van Dijck and Alinejad (2020) maintain that the networked model partakes of a broader transformation where ‘epistemic trust is at the heart of a socio-technical and a political power shift’ from an institutional-professional to networked-algorithmic form of trust (3). The two authors highlight the contrasting ethos around trust underlying the two models, which we rework as follows:

• a. The institutional model operates for the public good by subjecting knowledge and information to a codified, typically unidirectional framework of dissemination; the networked model is market-oriented and commodifies information and knowledge for popular consumption and subscription.

• b. The institutional model is governed by rules and procedures set down by human ‘gatekeepers’, namely establishments and experts; the networked model, based as it is on social media, is governed by algorithmic processes opaque to ordinary users and relatively less susceptible to control (although the private companies who own the algorithms can manipulate them).

• c. The institutional model tends toward a standard in terms of the knowledge and information it circulates, a standard that is scrutinized and upheld by specialized bodies and persons; the networked model thrives on heterogeneity, a laissez-fair logic, and the attention economy, enabling performative discourses, dissenting opinions, and heated polemics that drive up the number of clicks, likes, and shares.

Inevitably the networked model is more attractive to contemporary eyes not least because of its neoliberal strain. One must note, however, that the networked model exists by playing off the institutional model; the latter is still the mainstay of administrative communication in contemporary societies and is absolutely essential for effective governance.

The contemporary landscape of TESOL demonstrates an analogous structure. As a longstanding institution, TESOL places a premium on professional expertise and global standards. An excellent illustration is the US-based TESOL International Association, which reflects all the characteristics of van Dijk and Alinejad’s institutional model. Its investment in expertise is evidenced in its stated mission, namely to ‘[advance] professional expertise in English language teaching to speakers of other languages in multilingual contexts worldwide through professional learning, research, standards, and advocacy’.² The Association’s membership, which comprises language instructors, professors, and teachers; program administrators, coordinators, and supervisors; as well as teacher educators and trainers (in addition to students) exemplifies how qualifications and experience underpin the organization of resources around foreign language teaching. The Association holds events for disseminating best practices by industry leaders. The event Elevate (22–23 October 2024), for instance, features ‘live interactive workshops on critical English language teaching (ELT) topics led by top experts in the field’, once again foregrounding the centrality of expertise in the distribution of knowledge. Its framework is informed by research and guided by standards. These highly specialized standards, which indicate the Association’s gatekeeping role, are developed as reference guidelines for practitioners and hence prescriptive in nature. Among the many examples include Standards for Short-Term TEFL/TESL Certificate Programs With Program Assessment; Standards for Adult Education (comprising Standards for ESL/EFL Teachers of Adults and Standards for Adult Education ESL Programs); The TESOL Guidelines for Developing ESL Professional Teaching Standards; and The Common Core State Standards and English Learners—the Common Core State Standards being an initiative in the United States for state and national bodies to ‘develop common content standards for states to use’ at elementary and secondary school levels. Research resources classified under various heads are curated for practitioners’ use; toolkits are published by the Association’s own press and made available for free downloads, for example, a Community & Family Toolkit to help teachers engage the families of TESOL learners. Most tellingly, the Association issues a series of ‘position statements’ on a wide range of matters (Adult Education, Social Issues and Diversity, Young Learners, Higher Education, English Language Teaching Profession, and so on) in line with its ‘goal of improving public policy and understanding as outlined in its strategic plan’. The existence of such a strategic plan, supported by articulated positions on specific areas of concern, is a definite hallmark of the institutional model.

Alongside the institutional TESOL model, a networked model exists in the form of bottom-up practices in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL). Indeed it is slightly misleading to speak of a ‘model’ in this context, as the practices in question do not come under any unifying rubric. Be that as it may, networked TESOL poses a counterpoint to the institutional model by precisely not embracing standards or strategies, rules or procedures organized around a consistent set of values. On the contrary, these rhizomatic practices circumvent conventional terrains of language teaching, riding on multiple social media platforms simultaneously to perform creative pedagogies, seeking to attract views, likes, and shares from the general audience. If the rise of a new technology ‘has the effect of altering what we understand by information, and how it’s used in society’ (Seargeant 2024: 201), the same can be said of interactional practices like foreign language teaching. Networked TESOL decentres language teaching from institutionally managed frameworks and thresholds, instantiating how ‘the invention of new communications technologies, along with the way these change our capabilities with language, invariably causes disruptions to the established order’ (Seargeant 2024: 202). Tied to a commodity logic, networked TESOL has the potential to transform the enterprise of foreign language teaching into a laissez faire market, which anyone who can perform linguistic expertise to a popular viewership can freely enter. This alters the concept of linguistic expertise, which no longer hinges on membership in professional bodies or certifications by authorized bodies, but on individuals’ capacity to play the affordances of networked platforms to the furtherance of one’s media agenda. Linguistic expertise, in this context, is less an institutionally recognized quality than a self-professed attribute that one has to perpetuate and advertise in the platform society. This commodification of TESOL, as suggested earlier, changes the game of the industry, opening up an alternative plane on which teachers-as-influencers operate from below, as it were, as a counterpoint to the TESOL establishment.

We argue that networked affordances create an entirely different discursive space for TESOL purposes, facilitating translanguaging pedagogy (Li 2023). This not only involves pedagogical practices that draw on diverse multilingual and multimodal resources in teaching—for example, helping students create mnemonics in the form of translingual and intersemiotic analogies as in using the Chinese word la fen [læfɪŋ] to trigger ‘laughing’ in its American pronunciation in the first example we see at the beginning of this article; but crucially, practices that effect a change in mindset that entails transcending the raciolinguistic boundaries defining from the outset what counts as a ‘first’ or ‘second’, ‘native’ or ‘non-native’ language (García et al., 2021; Li and García 2022). Translanguaging pedagogy requires one to critically appreciate that, while named languages do serve certain social or ideological purposes, reifying these languages always leads to the exclusion of multilingual individuals whose lived experiences are grounded in the entremundos/borderlands (Li and García 2022: 317). As Li Wei (2023: 213) maintains, translanguaging pedagogy, as opposed to pedagogical translanguaging, is meant to create spaces to counter institutionalized monolingualism in linguistically diverse classrooms not only by introducing flexible translingual practices and complex trans-semiotic flows by design, but also more importantly by prioritizing learners through bringing their personal trajectories, perspectives, and voices into classroom activities and into learning. By opening the space for everybody to engage in learning, teaching, and growing juntos/together, the classroom becomes socially responsive to the histories of learners. And by opening the classroom to learners' backgrounds and out-of-class lives, the curriculum becomes a rich space in which every history and every identity can be presented and celebrated.

Case analysis

With this in mind, we now present a case example of a radically different and decidedly comic mode of TESOL in social media. Our objective is to showcase the highly textured translanguaging spaces (Li 2011) engendered in the networked model as opposed to the institutional model, focusing on the creative practices that culminate in translanguaging pedagogy, that is: a conceptual refashioning of TESOL. More generally the case example illuminates the complexity of TESOL ecology as language teaching becomes increasingly commodified in social media and develops into a competitive site for performative entrepreneurship.

Meet Jeremy Yang

Yang Jiacheng, better known as MrYang (one word; hereafter Yang), a social media microcelebrity with more than six million followers across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Born in Guangzhou, China, Yang moved to the United States at the age of five, which explains his excellent trilingual proficiency in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese—all of which are frequently and flexibly used in tandem in his content. He studied educational psychology at University of San Franscico. His social media persona is that of an English-language teacher (albeit an unorthodox one). There is great diversity to the type of content Yang produces, which includes tips on practical spoken English in real-life settings (e.g. how to order a cup of coffee at Starbucks or communicate with a waiter in a high-end restaurant). This section focuses on his more radically unconventional material the aim of which is not to ‘teach’ English but to make fun of it and its ‘native’ speakers. A talented comedian, Yang is also able to mimic several types of English accent as well as various stereotyped personae and dispositions, all of which contribute to the whimsical theatricality of his mode of teaching. Yang’s niche lies in his idiosyncratic but entertaining style of teaching everyday American English, using a combination of skit performances, influencer-style broadcasts, and mock-classroom lessons. The example discussed at the beginning of this article, one of Yang’s many video clips available in his channels, belongs to the last type. Yang is therefore not your typical TESOL instructor. There is a reflexive humour to his content delivery in which he adopts a complex stance which we call multifaceted satire: Asian-accented English, American English, internationally recognized English proficiency tests, and popular culture are all objects of his satire. On the face of it, he appears to be mocking the incorrect or inelegant pronunciation of English utterances by speakers of ‘other’ languages; at the same time, however, he shows critical awareness of the hegemony of American English and the English-language establishment writ large and often mocks institutional(ised) norms and practices such as the IELTS test. That is to say, while translanguaging his utterances, Yang is translanguaging TESOL pedagogy itself through multifaceted satire. We analyse a few vignettes below, chosen from his social media channels. For present purposes, we focus on his content creations around English language teaching, amongst an array of video clips on a diverse range of topics. These happen to be amongst the most viewed ones that have made him an online celebrity and ‘guru’ in English language teaching.

How to score IELTS 9

In the skit ‘How to Score IELTS 9’,³ Yang role-plays a candidate (C) sitting for an IELTS speaking test in front of a white American examiner (E). Throughout the scene C stages a negative example of an IELTS performance. First, C gives only pithy responses to E’s questions, sometimes comprising just one or two words, demonstrating poor interactive skills. Second, his pronunciation is quite off the mark; for example, ‘China’ becomes chai-la /ˈtʃaɪ lə/ and Facebook, facie-booker /fæʃiˈbʊkər/. Third, C’s responses can be so blatant or lacklustre as to defeat the point of E’s questions altogether. To the question, ‘if I visit your country [China], which kind of food should I try?’ C answers ‘Chinese food’; to the question ‘What is a popular drink in your country?’ comes ‘water’; to ‘What ended in [the year] 1896?’ C answers ‘1895 lor’, where lor is a Cantonese sentence-final particle. These answers are at once technically correct and, from an IELTS perspective, plainly unsound. Notwithstanding the humour, a metalinguistic commentary on TESOL is evident, for example:

E: What do you like to do?

C: I like to sleep.

E: What do you do with your free time?

C: I sleep with my free time.

The issue with C’s second utterance is not simply one of using an inappropriate preposition (compare: ‘I sleep in my free time’). What is obliquely reflected here is the way in which Chinese language speakers often learn English by rote, resulting in grammatical errors. This is partly attributable to the paratactical disposition of spoken Chinese, in which clauses can be juxtaposed with minimal regard to connecting devices such as prepositions. Hence, in response to E’s first question ‘What do you/like to/do?’, C’s answer ‘I/like to/sleep’ virtually maps the structure ‘What do ... do’ onto ‘sleep’. This is why to E’s second question, ‘What do you do/with your free time’, C’s response is ‘I sleep/with my free time’, juxtaposing ‘[I] sleep’ from his previous answer with the prepositional phrase ‘with your free time’, without regard to the preposition. This follows a paratactic logic where ‘[I] sleep’ displaces ‘What do [you] do’ in E’s second question in the same way as it displaces ‘What do [you like to] do’ in his first question. Consider another exchange in the same dialogue below:

E: Who is your hero?

C: My father.

E: Why do you consider him your hero?

C: He is not afraid of anything.

E: Is there anything your hero is frightened of?

C: My mother.

E’s last question is technically redundant, since C has already said in the previous turn that his father is ‘not afraid of anything’. This redundancy is meant to trigger the twist at the end, where C’s answer ‘My mother’ corresponds to ‘anything’, with the implication that C’s mother is a thing. All of this is complemented by C’s poker face throughout; as it were, his lack of engaging facial expression embodies the banality of the answers.

The dialogue in this skit can therefore be read as a critical commentary on the common pitfalls of EFL.⁴ But instead of giving a positive example of what one should do, the skit demonstrates how things can go really wrong in the socio-pragmatics sense. One should note, however, that Yang is not merely satirizing the erroneous performance of Chinese learners in English-speaking tests, but mocking IELTS as an institution as well. Clearly, Yang’s skit is meant to subvert the proposition in its title, reiterated at the closing with the Chinese phrase that means ‘nine marks scored’ (jiu fen dao shou, literally ‘nine marks in hand’). This ironic statement—C is obviously not going to score a 9—makes light of IELTS in all the self-seriousness of its testing mechanisms. One also observes that C is at ease with himself throughout, apparently unaware that he is making a fool of himself. This is in sharp contrast with E, who is constantly annoyed, bemused, and frustrated, and quite literally throws his hands (together with sheets of paper) up in the air at the end, totally despaired. This is an inversion of the usual power dynamic in an examination setting, where it is always the candidate, never the examiner, who is under pressure. And because the candidate in this case is a Chinese person and the examiner, a white American, there is a sense of a decolonial push (Mignolo and Walsh 2018), in the form of a comical satire against IELTS as a global benchmark to which all EFL individuals aspiring to study in the United States must pass.

Amazing speaking tips series

One of the most interesting series by Yang is his ‘amazing speaking tips’ series, an example of which we have seen at the start of this article. In our next example,⁵ Yang (T) teaches colloquial American English pronunciation to the same Chinese student (S) in the earlier episode. In this episode, the sentence on the LED screen reads ‘What are you going to do?’ S reads the sentence to a more or less acceptable standard and immediately praises herself for reading it well. The lesson proceeds as follows:

• T: [In Cantonese] That’s not too bad, but it lacks ‘feel’. [In Mandarin] Young Americans read it this way. SHIT BRO WHATCHA GON DO! [T says this in rapping style, accompanied with a hip-hop hand gesture and exaggerated facial expression]

• S: [In Mandarin]: Wow, that sounds so hip-hop.

• T: [In Mandarin] Now let me teach you a technique, and you’d turn into an American straight away. [T underlines the words ‘What are you’ in red with his stylus pen’.]

• T: [In Mandarin] How did you read these three words just now?

• [S reads.]

• T: [In Cantonese] That sounds so fobby. [In Mandarin] They like to combine the three words into one: WHATCHA

• S: [In Mandarin] Really?

• T: [In Mandarin] Yes. Because foreigners [Americans] are very lazy, you see. Let’s continue. How did you read these two words? [T underlines ‘going to’ on the screen.]

• [S reads.]

• T: [In Cantonese] Fobby. [In Mandarin] Combine the two words into one: GONNA

• [S reads after T.]

• T: [In Mandarin] But now I’d teach you an advanced version. [On the screen T strikes out the ‘na’ from gonna] Remove the NA; just say GON. [T swipes his left hand downward swiftly as he reads GON emphatically.]

• [S reads after T with the same hand swipe.]

• T: GON!

• S: GON!

• T: [In Mandarin] That’s right. There’s energy to it. [T underlines the word ‘do’] You used to read like you’re beating a drum, right?⁶ Now you can do that; just say: DO [T swipes his left hand downward swiftly as he reads DO emphatically.]

• [S reads after T with the same hand swipe.]

• T: DO!

• S: DO!

• T: Add this in front: SHIT BRO WHATCHA GON DO! [T says this again in rapping style, with a hip-hop hand gesture and exaggerated facial expression.]

• [S reads after T with the same gesture.]

• T: With this vibe you’d scare off many foreigners. You can go to the U.S. next month.

Unlike Yang’s other clips in the same series, this one turns a seemingly innocuous utterance ‘What are you going to do?’ into something very different; it is less about teaching the correct English pronunciation of the utterance than a hyperbolic performance of its American slang version. T affirms S’s original reading, but ‘enhances’ her pronunciation through a series of intralingual translations: ‘what are’ to whatcha; ‘going to’ to gonna, and ‘do’ into the same syllable with a punctuative onset. In so doing, T introduces a completely different register of American English, transgressing the basic tenets of TESOL in which slang can have no place at all. There is a satirical streak throughout, as seen in T’s remark that ‘foreigners are very lazy’ where the ‘foreigners’ are Americans. Having the same effect is his tongue-in-cheek praise of S’s reading, saying that she can go to the United States ‘next month’ with her ‘vibe’—when in fact the slang phrase will only embarrass her. The comedic effect of the dialogue is corroborated by Yang’s amplified voice as well as the hyperbolic body language and facial expression throughout the skit, duly reciprocated by the student (especially memorable are the two hand swipes that come with the reading of GON! and DO!), exploding in the final shit bro whatcha gon do! As noted above, exaggerated rapping gestures and threatrical intonations are central. Yang’s TESOL is therefore multimodal, involving embodied performance on the part of both teacher and student. This high performativity has the effect of trivialising American English, rendering it a sort of joke under the ostensible rubric of ‘teaching English’. There may even be an oblique critique here on the tendency in American English to conflate sounds beyond comprehension of other English-language users. After all, how is shit bro whatcha gon do! an instance of the titular ‘amazing English’?

A curious intervention also comes in here in the form of a subtitle, provided in the clip itself. T’s Mandarin utterance ‘Next month you can go to the U.S’ is juxtaposed with ‘Just remember to bring a bullet vest’ in English. This may not be an inadvertent error; given the overall ludicity of Yang’s oeuvre, it is possible to read it as a sly commentary on the security situation in the United States where shooting incidents are not uncommon (and this claim is corroborated by our final example below). At any rate, it creates a disjuncture between the Mandarin utterance and the English subtitle in conjunction with the gaping difference between ‘proper’ and slang English.

Satirising native English

Although Yang explicitly positions himself as an English teacher, his online persona is a complex one, and his brand of TESOL extends far beyond the normative basis governing standard pedagogies. A striking example is his series of clips on Asian accents of English, which is expressly about how not to use American English. In one clip on using English in Thailand,⁷ for instance, Yang doubles up as a speaker of standard English and a speaker of Thai-accented English, creating a humorous sequence of misalignment and realignment of accents. A great deal of linguistic caricature is involved: ‘McDonald’s’ becomes mac-don-naal with a long vowel in the last syllable to mimic Thai intonation; ‘french fries’ becomes fanfi (rhyming with ‘wifi’); ‘Seven Eleven’ becomes say wen ee lay wen; sauce becomes saud; ‘strawberry’ becomes satoh belli (again with a long end vowel at the end). In the case of ‘Starbucks’, the Chinese subtitle that reads 4打八克 is an excellent example of translanguaging that approximates, using Mandarin (si-da-ba-ke), the articulation of the word as it presumably sounds in Thai.

On the face of it, the video appears to be mocking Thai people for their un-American English, and this is exacerbated by Yang’s bodily antics and dramatic tone when he is acting as the Thai person, who at one instance speaks gibberish that presumably ‘stands in’ for Thai. But in so doing he also satirizes the inefficacy of American English, making visible marginalized accents of spoken English that are by default excluded from normative English-language teaching. At one point, Yang moves briefly into a relatively serious pedagogic mode, stating that Thai people speak English like the Chinese, advising his audience to speak English one syllable at a time and not make retroflex sounds. This shows that the video clip is at least partly meant to help Chinese viewers manage simple conversations in Thailand by accommodating local accents. Yang’s networked TESOL is therefore not only invested in teaching ‘correct’ English (although he has other videos on that too) and goes beyond a simple ‘relocation’ of English (Saraceni 2010). In teaching English in regional accents, which again does not figure in institutional TESOL, he inverts the usual hierarchies between received and accented pronunciation, suggesting that it is speakers of American English who should be adjusting to the needs of speakers of foreign English. On this analysis the skit is also a mocking critique of the complacent and self-entitled attitude of American English users when they are abroad. This is insinuated into a moment around the word ‘Starbucks’, where the Thai person impersonated by Yang sneaks in the phrase ‘stupid bakkyarō’, the latter word meaning ‘stupid’ in Japanese. Thus, while Yang the American English speaker is frustrated with his Thai counterpart for not being able to understand him, the Thai person surreptitiously calls him stupid using an almost indiscernible phrase in two languages. Here we witness once again Yang’s multifaceted satire in which he simultaneously and critically engages the non-standard and the standard with respect to spoken English.

Elsewhere Yang takes his challenge of the perceived status of American English even further. In a series of mock music videos (MVs) riffing off popular songs from various languages and whose lyrics comprise broken English reminiscent of Chinglish, Yang discards all notions of correctness and positions ungrammatical English as a legitimate medium in translanguaging popular culture. In these MVs Yang takes on the role of singer, dancer, and sometimes instrumentalist, showcasing his multicompetence as an all-round talent. Nothing could be further from the traditional image of an English teacher. Indeed Yang was once a professional singer before he took on the mantle of English teaching in social media, but these MVs constitute more a site for the ludic as well as embodied performance of English than an excursion in his former music career. They play out the persona of a self-appointed English teacher engaged in networked TESOL, who designs teaching and learning content much more like social media influencers than the typical classroom teacher.

As an illustration, the following lyrics are excerpted from an MV that purports to be a cover version of a pop song by Taiwanese singer Jay Chou. Readers are asked to click on the relevant link in the endnote to appreciate the MV’s total performativity of which Yang’s body language is a part.⁸

Me a bad boy

You so fat I cannot hug you

You say that I like cry cry

I so scare

Everyday wait for rain

Don’t want you to see me shy shy

I see the star, I go wishy wishy

Cry so loud, God will see me

I want love but you want f**k me

Change myself for you but I become crazy

I go hospital get surgery

Please come on to visit me

From a TESOL perspective, this type of English is totally unacceptable in terms of both the content and the grammar; and herein lies the transgressive potential of Yang’s enterprise. For Yang’s primary audience, namely Chinese-language users who are learning English, this may well be an entertaining route into the English language, notwithstanding all the technical infelicities. As for other potential viewers with a higher proficiency in English, this kind of MVs will possibly elicit a good laughter. At any rate, Yang does not intend the lyrics to serve as a model for learners, as evidenced in the following line that appears in virtually all of such mock MVs on his platforms: ‘Don’t skip your English class’. This should be read as a metalinguistic statement that the kind of English performed here is to be differentiated from that for communication purposes. Yet it also raises the possibility that there are distinct registers of English, each legitimate in its own way, challenging the exclusive ownership of English by so-called native speakers. In performing a register of English unacceptable to native ears, Yang invokes a non-normative, multimodal, and marked style of English that may be palatable to certain classes of speakers.

A jarring feature in these MVs lies in their Chinese-English bilingual lyrics, which are in constant tension with each other. For example, ‘You so fat I cannot hug you’ in the above example is a mischievous correspondence to ‘I didn’t hug you tight’. The same goes for ‘Cry so loud, will God see me’, the Chinese version of which is ‘Will there be a miracle after a loud cry?’ Most erroneously, the uncouth ‘I want love but you want f**k me’ is aligned with the much more demur ‘It’s alright to just be friends’ in the Chinese. These bilingual subtitles are clearly not translations of each other; and given Yang’s high proficiency in English and Chinese, this can be no accident. On the contrary, the schism between the two languages serves as a rhetorical device to heighten awareness of the ludic nature of the MV, as part of Yang’s projection of his semi-serious stance to English learning. The Chinese-English lyrics, in addition to the K-pop inflection in this example, constitute a translanguaging tension which, we argue, is integral to Yang’s iconoclastic brand of TESOL—one that is creative, critical, and contingent on the logics of social media.

Discussion and conclusion

This article has presented a case example of what we have called networked TESOL as opposed to institutional TESOL. Institutional TESOL operates within the framework of the traditional classroom even as it continuously seeks to implement new pedagogies; networked TESOL, however, is based on the attention economy and commodification logics of the social media, which precipitate a radically different presentation of self with respect to so-called linguistic experts. Whereas in institutional TESOL linguistic expertise is bestowed upon someone by an authoritative body after completion of the requisite training, in networked TESOL linguistic expertise is claimable by individuals without any regard to established criteria from above. Generally, these self-professed experts are individuals with the personal charisma to sustain an online followership and the technical skills to manipulate media technologies for effective self-presentation, not unlike microcelebrities or influencers. This creates very different personae than we might expect from a conventional language teacher, pointing to a refashioning of what is considered linguistic expertise. The definition of what makes an expert needs revisiting in networked modes of pedagogical communication.

Networked TESOL, therefore, constitutes an alternative ecology in foreign language education that promotes a democratisation of linguistic expertise—one does not need formal certification to brand themselves as a language instructor in social media—but also a ludification of language pedagogy, in contrast to rote learning by way of textbooks. Here the term ‘ludic’ is to be interpreted as ‘serious fun’. Derived from the Latin noun ludus, which denotes such things as games, sports, stage shows, or jokes, the term ‘ludic’ can refer to ‘architecture that is playful, narrative that is humorous and even satirical, and literature that is light’ (Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary n.d). In addition to ludic architecture and ludic literature, there is ludic translation, which pivots translating from a linear act of transferring meaning across languages to a rhizomatic practice of adding semiotic value to the original text by reframing it not just in a different language, but also in a different mode and medium (Lee 2022). To all of this, might we not have ludic literacy, in which straitlaced language education gives way partially to humour, satire, a general lightness in teaching and learning? Ludic literacy is a queering of conventional literacy practices, opening up a flexible space in which language learning unravels through the performative deployment of linguistic and non-linguistic resources as well as dialogic action in which the traditional roles of teacher and student are set in flux. It instantiates what media scholars call the ludification of culture, in which pre-given identities are reconstructed and deconstructed, and novel, often playful identities are articulated (Raessens 2006: 55). Whilst critiques of institutional TESOL have already raised many questions regarding standardized speaking tests, the teaching of pronunciation, and broader issues of the socio-cultural politics of English language teaching in the era of globalisation (e.g. Mckay 2000; Spolsky 2002; Hughes 2004; Seedhouse and Egbert 2006; Pennington 2021; Pennycook 2021), applied linguistics scholarship has so far paid little attention to networked TESOL and how ludic literacy impacts on the ecology of foreign language education. The preponderance of social media gives rise at once to a crisis and an opportunity for the TESOL community to rethink its methodologies and the assumptions therein. It is therefore imperative for TESOL to seriously embrace the idea of play. In practical terms, this means being experimental in the use of pedagogical resources outside of the instructor’s toolkit or manual. Because ludic literacy transcends boundaries, including but not limited to those between named languages, and subjects teaching and learning to dramatic treatment, it always entails risk. With ludic literacy, TESOL practitioners perform their task ‘as a wager and in gambit mode’ (Lee 2022: 64).

The case of Yang we have examined in this article is an exemplary instance. Using a multifaceted satirical stance, he apparently criticizes substandard English, but implicitly mocks at the inadequacies of literacy institutions such as IELTS as well as so called ‘native’ American English itself—recall the comical example of shit bro whatcha gonna do! Yang’s iconoclastic self-branding as an English teacher is based on translanguaging through his interweaving of English (in various accents), Cantonese, and Mandarin, as well as his choreography of dramatic modes of teaching across different genres (skits, MVs, and so on). This in turn catalyses a new imaginary of TESOL on the basis of digital affordances. In other words, transcending the boundaries across languages, modes, and media brings about translanguaging pedagogy, in which the conventional mannerisms of teaching English as a foreign language are transgressed and transformed.

Ultimately, networked TESOL leads to the question of linguistic ownership. In an age of platforms in which expertise may be claimed, and also disclaimed, by individuals rather than managed by institutions, who owns English eventually? Perhaps this is the wrong question to ask in the wake of Post-multilingualism, in which ‘simply having many different languages is no longer sufficient either for the individual or for society as a whole’; in which ‘multiple ownerships and more complex interweaving of languages and language varieties’ become possible; and where ‘boundaries between languages, between languages and other communicative means and the relationship between language and the nation-state are being constantly reassessed, broken or adjusted’ (Li 2018: 22; emphasis added). If the relation between English as a named language and its traditional bases of native speakership (US, UK, Canada, Australia) is subject to constant reassessment and adjustment, then English as a global language is owned by no one and everyone at the same time—it can have multiple ownerships transcending the hierarchies between what are traditionally considered native and non-native. The emergence of networked TESOL in translanguaging digital spaces offers an opportunity to critically consider this post-multilingual challenge.

Notes on Contributors

Tong King Lee is Professor of Language and Communication in the School of English, University of Hong Kong and Honorary Professor of Culture, Communication and Media at University College London. He is the author of Kongish (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Choreographies of Multilingualism (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Li Wei is Director and Dean of the Institute of Education, University College London, UK, where he is Professor of Applied Linguistics. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, Academa Europaea, Academy of Social Sciences (UK), and Royal Society of Arts (UK). He is Editor of International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism and Applied Linguistics Review.

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References