Reading, Writing, and The Prime Directive: Exploring Emoji as a Literacy Instruction Tool in Developmental Reading and Writing/First-Year Writing Corequisites

As the fate of US community college developmental education hangs in the balance, developmental reading and writing instructors must steadfastly teach basic literacy skills to a diverse student population with varying degrees of literacy proficiency. Even more dauntingly, educators are tasked with procuring andragogically-and-pedagogically appropriate teaching tools – those that meet the needs of the individual student while being accessible and relatable to this adult learner demographic. This dissertation, titled Reading, Writing, and The Prime Directive: Exploring Emoji as Literacy Instruction Tool in Developmental Reading and Writing/First-Year Writing Corequisites, proposes emoji as one such viable literacy and postsecondary writing teaching tool. My dissertation chronicles a Texas community college integrated reading and writing project in which students attempt to demonstrate mastery of State-mandated literacy content areas using both traditional writing and emoji. By postulating emoji as a visual literacy instructional tool, this study also explores emoji’s multimodal qualities and their wider implications on teaching reading and writing within the developmental and First-Year Writing corequisite classes. Further, my work aims to situate emoji within various conceptual frameworks including semiotics, constructivism, and New Literacy Studies with emphases in visual literacy and rhetoric. This study then provides data-driven research that explores shared meanings of emoji as a semiotic domain and, in doing so, offers opportunities for further research in affinity groups, iconographic tracking, and rendered ecologies with particular respect to advancing literacy and first year and postsecondary writing instructional efforts. The concluding discussion suggests possible rhetorical situations, projections, challenges, and affordances as wider implications of using emoji and other semiotic tools as primary discourse languages and semiotic domains.