Influencing language: A study of Mandarin and Korean teacher-influencers and language ideology in the social media space

This dissertation investigates social media teacher-influencers and the discursive practices through which they influence the language ideologies of their audiences. Language teaching on algorithm-driven social media applications is a popular niche for content creators who wish to seek out an audience beyond the traditional classroom. But these content creators, who I call “teacher-influencers,” are not only seeking audience for what could be deemed as merely edutainment. Instead, teacher-influencers both replicate and challenge what Bourdieu (1974) called the “academic market” as they carve out niches for their own teaching style and make appeals to potential learners based on the perceived capital held by the languages they teach. This academic market of social media affords teacher-influencers the opportunity to challenge traditional hierarchies reproduced in formal educational institutions as they instead position themselves as more effective, authentic, or relevant teachers of a target language, a positioning afforded to them by the dynamics of the social media space. This creative, teacher-influencer-centered marketplace thus becomes a site for negotiation of language ideologies, as teacher-influencers capitalize on perceptions of linguistic capital in pursuit of an attentive audience. Within influencer-driven learning networks, dominant ideologies emerge across the social media content created by these teacher influencers. Using discourse-centered social media ethnography, I first define the teacher-influencer and the ways their online teaching blurs the boundaries between formal, informal, and nonformal language teaching (Dressman, 2020). I then examine two groups of teacher influencers: Taiwanese Mandarin teachers and Korean teachers. I argue that the Taiwanese-Mandarin teacher-influencers create an alternative academic market where Taiwanese Mandarin is consistently positioned as a legitimate and distinct variety of Mandarin Chinese. I argue that the Korean language teacher-influencers negotiate the role of Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, as the main factor motivating Korean language learning, with some teacher-influencers orienting toward a more “serious” type of language study as a more legitimate goal. This research argues that teacher-influencers demonstrate the potential of online language learning to challenge traditional pedagogies by reshaping the language learning “classroom” into a complex, multifaceted, asynchronous network of affiliations where the intersection of language and culture is realized.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Linguistics

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• King, Elizabeth Brianna

Contributors dc:contributor

• Mendoza, Anna
• Sadler, Randall W.
• Bhatt, Rakesh
• Smalls, Krystal

• Social Media
• Language Ideology
• Sociolinguistics
• Language Education
• Online Language Education

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Elizabeth King

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129920

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F129920