Pop Culture in Language Education provides comprehensive insight on how studies of pop culture can inform language teaching and learning. The volume offers a state-of-the-art overview of empirically informed, cutting-edge research that tackles both theoretical concerns and practical implications.

Pop Culture in Language Education provides comprehensive insight on how studies of pop culture can inform language teaching and learning. The volume offers a state-of-the-art overview of empirically informed, cutting-edge research that tackles both theoretical concerns and practical implications. The book focuses on how a diverse array of pop culture artifacts such as pop and rap music, movies and TV series, comics and cartoons, fan fiction, and video games can be exploited for the development of language skills. It establishes the study of pop culture and its language as a serious subfield within language education and applied linguistics and explores how studies of pop culture, its language, and its non-linguistic affordances can inform language education at various levels of proficiency and with various learner populations. Presenting a broad range of quantitative and qualitative research approaches including case studies on how pop culture has been used successfully in language education in and beyond the classroom, this book will be of great interest for academics, researchers, and students in the field of language education, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics, as well as for language teachers and materials developers.

"This volume convincingly shows why pop culture must have a firm place in foreign language education- You cannot teach a language without teaching its (popular) culture." Maria Eisenmann, Professor of English Didactics, University of Würzburg, Germany "The prevalence of and widespread access to multilingual popular cultural artifacts make them a very real part of our everyday lives, and interacting with pop culture requires skills to manage and negotiate meanings. Decoding the language of popular culture is a fruitful exercise for all consumers, but foreign language students in particular may have the most to gain from such an endeavor. Pop Culture in Foreign Language Education not only acknowledges popular cultural capital but also definitively establishes the educational value of popular cultural materials. The range and diversity of artifacts included in the analyses and the inclusion of chapters which take turns highlighting methodology, application, and theory contribute to a multi-purpose volume that appeals to students and teachers alike." Kristy Beers Fägersten, Professor of English Linguistics, Södertörn University, Sweden.