Another passion of mine lies at the intersection of foreign language education and media communication studies. My research focuses on language-related audiovisual content, language-learning videos, and their potential use as learning media. Exploring these forms of visual culture in the post-digital era, I investigate how social media content can be selected, adapted, and curated for German language education, linguistics and intercultural learning.
From Social Media Content to Learning Media
An interdisciplinary research project connecting visual culture, media and communication studies, and German language education.
What happens when we encounter a foreign language not in a textbook, but while scrolling through Instagram or TikTok?
As a learner of Japanese myself, I have always been fascinated by the playful, sometimes absurd ways in which language appears on social media. Humor, music, visual effects, and everyday expressions can make language feel more approachable — even when a video was never intended for educational purposes.
Curious about these formats, I created my own German-language Instagram Reel in Kyoto, experimenting with lip-syncing, digital filters, and everyday phrases. I also designed a small worksheet to explore how this playful piece of content might become part of a language-learning activity.
But social media also offers countless examples of German circulating far beyond the language classroom. In 2026, the song Du bist gut genug gained international attention through short videos, dance performances, and playful reinterpretations of its German lyrics. Such moments reveal how language travels across cultural and linguistic boundaries — often without any intention to teach it.
This leads to the central question of my research:
Under what conditions can social media content take on the function of a learning medium?
My work explores the relationship between language-related audiovisual content, language-learning videos, and their potential use as learning media. Rather than assuming that engaging content automatically supports learning, I investigate how media design, educational adaptation, and informed curation can make such content meaningful within specific teaching and learning contexts, particularly in German as a Foreign Language (DaF) education in Japan.
Looking ahead, I hope to develop this research through interdisciplinary exchange with scholars in linguistics, foreign language pedagogy, German studies, and media and communication studies — and through practical collaborations with content creators, educators, and media designers.
For me, the most exciting questions
emerge where academic research,
creative experimentation, and
everyday digital culture meet.
Conferences
GIG Bangkok 2026 l Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand l 22.-24. July 2026
FUTURE EDU by TDIFF l Bali, Indonesia l July 2025
