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Internet celebrities, foreign speakers and Chinese learning: The case of MYBY on YouTube
- Source: East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Volume 9, Issue Chinese Popular Culture in Translation and Transmission, Sep 2023, p. 209 - 226
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- 22 Feb 2022
- 12 Feb 2023
- 25 Sep 2023
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.