My Students Don’t Like the Thumbs Up Emoji: Practical Ways to Blend Emoji Use into Classroom Communication and Writing Practice

By Wai Yan Htut

A student of mine once requested via chat, “May I submit [a piece of homework] tomorrow because my phone battery is about to die?” I casually reacted with the emoji👍to his text. Later, that student texted me privately: “Are you angry with me? Should I submit anyway?” It was at that moment that I realised that receiving a thumbs-up in a chat feels cold or even passive-aggressive to them. I have found that my students— Generation Z— do not like👍emojis at all.

This moment alerted me to revisit the idea of register and digital pragmatics, besides any lessons and units. When we have diverse understandings of what a single emoji means — and we will, given the myriad generational differences that can be found in this area — disagreement is not a problem. Instead, it is a point to highlight in class and prepare our students for.

Crystal (2021) notes that 🙏 means prayer to some, applause to others, and pleading to others still. In my case, 👍 means that I was fine with the request being made, but my student thought I was mad about his late request. It might be easy to dismiss this type of language ambiguity as a mere generational quirk, but studies show that emojis do not degrade language; rather, they enrich it with a complex, measurable layer of visual communication, because language is constantly evolving, particularly driven by popular culture and technology (Bridge, 2018).

So, what if we use emojis and text together in classroom settings? This is not a new thing either. SMS writing that considers smile and sad emojis as emotion descriptors was part of the Unit 10 writing task in Spencer’s (2016) Macmillan Gateway B1 coursebook. Teachers can integrate the proper use of emojis in writing tasks by considering commonly used, useful emojis among learners’ generation. Hand et al. (2022) show that emojis with text change how readers perceive both the message and the sender. These are not trivial points but the basis for a genuine discussion about audience, culture, and communicative risk, which can promote what pragmatic competence looks like in practice.

From instructions to ICQ follow-up questions, emojis can serve as multimodal cues to help teachers convey the complete picture of tasks or a complicated set of instructions. Petcoff et al. (2024) conducted a multi-year study with developmental college students and found that emoji-integrated writing tasks produced measurable gains in formal literacy skills. The explanation draws on bimodality: activating the visual channel first appears to scaffold access to the verbal one. For language learners who may already feel locked out of academic English texts, this pathway is genuinely relevant to understanding instructions for some complex, lengthy tasks in our classroom. For language teachers, this means we can leverage our students’ intuitive “semioliteracy” as a bridge to traditional academic skills. Thus, acknowledging a student’s out-of-school digital language use can empower them to master formal learning and understand English at a higher level of thinking.

So, how can we apply the use of emojis in our English classroom settings?

There are several ways to bring this into the classroom without changing it into separate lessons. The following tasks can be integrated into our writing and communication lessons, where students are already dealing with language, tone, and audience.

1. Instructions and ICQs with Emojis

First of all, when setting up an activity, particularly one with multiple steps, adding a relevant emoji next to each instruction can serve as a visual cue.

For example, a reading task might begin with

📖 Read the passage below
✏️ Underline three words you do not know, and then
💬 Discuss your words with a partner.

The emojis chunk the instructions visually so that learners can glance back at the board and locate which step they are on, without re-reading the entire sequence. This is especially useful in large classes where not every student catches the instruction the first time it was given verbally.

ICQs can also work the same way. After explaining a task, a teacher might do a quick check (Having these questions ready to go in a Word document you can show on the whiteboard or in Zoom will help):

“Are you working on this alone or with your partner? 👤 or 👥?”

“Do you need to use full sentences? ✅ or ❌?”

The emoji does not replace the question but reinforces the answer format and reduces the processing load for students who are still working through the English of the instruction itself. Over time, students begin to associate certain emojis with classroom routines, which means the task preparation becomes faster and smoother. It might be worth noting that some of the personalities that ChatGPT exhibits will do the same thing – emojis are often found in AI-generated text, and this is all with a view to enhancing readability. Whatever our feelings about AI, we shouldn’t stop ourselves from making use of practices that work.

2. Informal and Formal writing tasks with appropriate use of emojis

2.1 Texting with Emojis

A simple texting task can be prepared like this.

Ask students to write a short message to a friend. It should be an example of their day-to-day text communication, such as canceling a get-together, with blanks where emojis are placed. For example, withdrawing from an invitation:

“sorry I can’t make it ___ something came up ____.”

Allow your students to brainstorm which emojis are appropriate and most effective for successful communication. The aim here is not to assess the emojis but to get students producing natural, communicative language in a format they could actually use outside the classroom. From here, the teacher can draw attention to what each emoji is doing in the message – and to discuss, if possible, how different generations might understand the emojis in this context.

If the students come up with something like, “sorry can’t make it 😭 something came up 🙏.” In this example, the 😭 is signalling genuine disappointment. The 🙏 is softening the cancellation, not a high-five anymore – it has shifted, contextually, from being a high-five to being the prayer hands emoji – you might wonder what the difference is between the two, and you would not be alone in this! Here there is the suggestion that the writer hopes that the reader will understand and accept their absence from the social event.

2.2 Translate a text exchange into an email (informal to formal)

Find or create a short, realistic text conversation, such as a group chat trying to organize something, or anything that looks like what your students actually send each other. They need to convert the text into a formal email exchange. Then, translating those emojis and other uses of informal language forces their real decisions. For example, “omg yes 🔥” has to become something more formal. “👌” has to become something more appropriate. Everywhere an emoji appears, a feeling or stance is signaled — and in the email version, that signal has to come from the language itself, or from what they have previously learned.

This task works particularly well because students are not starting from nothing. They already understand what the text exchange meant. They are not searching for ideas — they are searching for the right words. That is a much more productive cognitive place to write from, and it removes the danger of the ‘blank page’ that often ruins writing lessons before they can even get started.

2.3 Reacting to Emails and Texts with Emojis

Along with the email exchange task, reacting to emails with an emoji in a formal context is sometimes culturally and professionally difficult for users on messaging platforms (and for teachers as well 😜). This task shifts the focus from production to interpretation. This activity can follow up on the previous formal email exchange.

Show students their emails from the previous activity, such as a manager reminding the team about the deadline for decorating the room before an office birthday party.

Ask them to react with a single, professional, appropriate emoji.

Then compare responses across the class. Someone who may react with 👍 and someone with 😅 read the same email with different tone and facial expression, and that difference opens up a post-production discussion about tone, power dynamics, and what is appropriate and what is not in different contexts. This is where the students begin to realise that emoji choice is not random. It does carry social weight, and the wrong reaction in a work chat could create exactly the kind of misunderstanding I had with my own student at the beginning of this article.

Conclusion

From producing texts with emojis to translating between registers, each of these tasks asks students to do something they might rarely get a chance to do in a typical language classroom. The emojis are not the lesson. This is just another communication-related phenomenon that they definitely encounter on a daily basis. Nothing in communication is neutral, and the classroom is one of the few places where our students can slowly, carefully examine that in a language they are still learning to trust.

References

Crystal, D. (2021, July 2). The past, present, and future of emojis. Cambridge University Press & Assessment Blog.

Bridge, M. (2018). English is alive: Recent changes in the English language and how we can keep our English up to date. IH Journal, (44). https://ihworld.com/ih-journal/issues/issue-44/english-is-alive-recent-changes-in-the-english-language-and-how-we-can-keep-our-english-up-to-date/

Hand, C. J., Burd, K., Oliver, A., & Robus, C. M. (2022). Interactions between text content and emoji types determine perceptions of both messages and senders. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 8, 100242. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2022.100242

Spencer, D. (2016). Gateway 2nd edition B1 Student’s Book. Macmillan.

Petcoff , O. W., Palaganas, J. C., & Danesi, M. (2024). Emoji Literacy as a Teaching Tool. In Emoji in Higher Education: A Healthcare-Based Perspective (pp. 29–55). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009253994.004

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