Internet celebrities, foreign speakers, and Chinese learning: The case of MYBY on YouTube

Wang, Xuan ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6227-6008 and Chung, Elaine ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1137-3190 2023. Internet celebrities, foreign speakers, and Chinese learning: The case of MYBY on YouTube. East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 9 (2) , pp. 209-226. 10.1386/eapc_00108_1

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Abstract

This article studies internet celebrity culture as a crucial site of public learning and pedagogy, exploring the capacity of celebrated foreign speakers of Chinese to popularize discourses and knowledge of the language on social media. It specifically focuses on the YouTube channel MYBY founded by Martin Wiley Woods and Blair Sugarman, two foreign television personalities in China who have successfully extended their fame from traditional media to the internet. Through a multimodal discourse analysis of their bilingual ‘talk shows’ in which they evaluate the Chinese pronunciation and accents of other non-native speakers and share their own learning experiences, we discuss how Woods and Sugarman perform their identities as both model learners and language influencers by producing and challenging the language ideologies of normativity and speakerhood. We argue that internet celebrity pedagogy is an increasingly important genre of popular culture that discursively shapes the global transmission of Chinese language and linguaculture.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Modern Languages
Publisher:	Intellect
ISSN:	2051-7084
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	14 July 2023
Date of Acceptance:	14 June 2023
Last Modified:	08 Nov 2024 02:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/160877

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