Memes en la enseñanza intercultural de la lengua italiana

Abstract

The current remote education has brought with it several pedagogical challenges, among which stands out the lack of flexibility in methodologies for teaching a foreign language, which is why, in order to overcome them, the research proposes the use of didactic units with memes due to their sociocultural impact, basing its theoretical positions on disciplines such as anthropology regarding the relationship between culture, language, identity, sociology from social practices, communicative studies from intercultural digital communication and education from meaningful learning and foreign language teaching, focusing on the intercultural implications evidenced in memes and highlighting their usefulness in the educational context, becoming a tool of easy implementation in the virtual and face-to-face classroom and expanding in a conscious and participatory way the strategies for learning, constituting themselves as elements of public participation while they are used to perform a critical reading of the context in which they are created and reproduced. The data collection was carried out during the month of October 2021, proposing a creative space where Italian language learners of a basic level located in Peru would elaborate a narrative based on memes in this language. Among the findings, it is found that memes allow students to highlight relevant aspects of their culture of origin, reinforcing their identity boundaries while building an intercultural dialogue from products of mass culture and allow them to recognize, analyze and question current issues of the Italian context in a dialogue with their contexts. The proposed space responds to students' daily practices as a resource to complement their linguistic training in a reflexive and critical way.