Emoticons

Syllabus and Material Design: Text Messages, Emoticons Abstract This study is on text messaging and emotional icons or emoticons in the scope of syllabus and materials design. The researchers think that learning and teaching a foreign language will be more interesting, memorable, and less tedious in this regard. In the present study, the researchers intend to show the effect of emoticons to manifest L2 learners’ emotion, and to convey their message in an online or offline foreign language-learning context. This kind of learning will hopefully become a wildly used technique to enhance today’s classroom environment in educational settings. Effects of emotional cues transmitted in e-mail communication on the emotions experienced by senders and receivers confirmed this claim (Yuuki Kato, Shogo Kato, Kanji Akahori 2006, Japan). Emotional words in emotional setting cannot be judged correctly due to the lack of nonverbal cues, including facial expressions. The errors in judging others’ emotions can lead to misunderstandings or misinterpretations. Therefore, evidence suggests further studies to make learning a second language an effective and interesting tool to engage students in higher level of thinking skills. This research intends to enhance the educational results in EFL classes, which are not only influenced by the efficiency in speaking, reading, listening, and writing skills but also by better emotional expressing, and message conveying, even in computer-mediated communication or CMC. This paper offers a practical syllabus and materials design to make this assumption more tangible. Key terms: emoticons, emotional icons, CMC (computer-mediated communication)