Semantic and emotional challenges in emoji interpretation across educational levels and digital platforms

Technological advances in education have integrated digital resources, like emojis, into education and especially into foreign language teaching. These symbols present a semantic and emotional complexity that influences message interpretation and raises the need to understand their use in educational and digital contexts. This study aims to explore the diversity of semantic and emotional interpretations of 24 emojis among 333 Secondary, Baccalaureate students and future teachers and how emojis’ graphical-visual variety in digital platforms influences these interpretations. A mixed study was conducted, combining quantitative-descriptive and qualitative-interpretative methods. The results revealed that Generation Z students generally prefer facial emojis and that younger students, those in secondary school, showed greater interpretative accuracy according to Unicode, suggesting greater digital familiarity. A higher variability was found in the perceptions of emojis on the negative spectrum (disgusted and fearful), while those on the positive spectrum (happy and surprised) were perceived more univocally, although the happy emoji had atypical interpretations such as “threat”. Graphic-visual differences across platforms increase this variability, challenging their univocality. In the educational context, this diversity should be considered in the design of teaching materials, especially in second language teaching, due to its relationship with the development of pragmatic and cultural competences.