Emojis as Tools for Learning: Understanding Their Pragmatic Functions in EFL Students’ Tweets

The rise of emojis has piqued the interest of many scholars over the past few decades, as is evident by a growing body of emoji literature within various fields. This study adopted a qualitative ethnographic approach to explore the pragmatic functions of emojis in the tweets of 15 female undergraduate and graduate EFL students. The focus was on the roles emojis occupied relative to speech acts, identity representation, and language change. Semi-structured interviews and non-participant observations were used as data collection methods while reflexive thematic analysis followed for the analysis. There were six pragmatic functions of emojis, namely expressing emotions, making meaning, mirroring personal beliefs, signaling familiarity, decorating the tweet, and substituting nonverbal cues. Additionally, emojis mitigated speech acts: They were chiefly used to emphasize expressives, but also to soften directives and accompany representatives and commissives. Such emojis represented the participants’ identity, yet the participants’ personalities and societal roles were rarely represented by these emojis due to personal preferences. The evolution of emojis from emoticons to graphicons, however, was identifiable.