Intrinsic to digital writing since at least the mid-2010s, emoji can no longer be considered to be a mere ancillary set of picture words for sprucing up informal written messages. They constitute a veritable semiotic code, which is being used in all areas of social interaction, from advertising to political campaigning and to the forensic analyses of written messages. One area of potential use, which has received relatively little attention, is the use of emoji in education, and especially as a basis for imparting traditional academic literacy. That goal is explicated brilliantly by Omonpee Petcoff’s book, Of Emoji and Semioliteracy: Reading, Writing, and Texting in the Literacy Instruction Classroom, in which she discusses and illustrates in an in-depth manner how and why emoji can be incorporated into literacy instruction in the everyday classroom, but especially in teaching students who are somewhat challenged in this area.

In an age where the perceived social value of literacy has lost its luster, and where literacy itself is no longer a monolithic skill, based on print and alphabetic competence, Petcoff’s book stands out as vital. Before the advent of alphabets around 1000 BCE, people communicated and passed on their knowledge through the spoken word. But even in early cultures, tools had been invented for recording and preserving ideas in pictographic form. So instinctive is pictography as a mode of writing that it comes as little surprise to find that it has not disappeared from the modern world, even though most of our written communication is still based on utilizing the alphabet. It manifests itself in forms of writing and literacy that range from arrows in public places to indicate directions to the systematic use of emoji in everyday digital writing.

Traditionally, those who are literate – that is, those who can read and write – are those who have always wielded power and influence throughout history. Before the 1400s, the vast majority of people were illiterate. Most had never had an opportunity to learn to read because there were few schools, and books were scarce and often expensive. Although some people at every level of society could read, most literate people belonged to the upper classes. Illiterate people relied on literate people to read and write for them. Literacy spread at an uneven rate until the invention of the printing press in the late 1400s. The Canadian communications theorist, Marshall McLuhan (1962) characterized the new world order shaped by the advent of that technology the “Gutenberg Galaxy,” after the European inventor of the printing press, the German printer Johannes Gutenberg (c.1395–1468). Through books, newspapers, pamphlets, and posters, McLuhan argued, the printed word became, after the fifteenth century, the primary means for the propagation of knowledge and ideas, leading to a spreading desire to gain literacy on behalf of everyone, no matter their social backgrounds. With the spread of commerce and industry during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, large numbers of people migrated to cities where they were forced to learn how to read instructions and perform other tasks that required literacy. Governments began to value educated citizens, and systems of public schooling expanded. By the late 1800s, formal education had become common and legally obligatory virtually everywhere. As a result, more people had the opportunity and motivation to learn to read and write, causing the literacy rate to rise rapidly.

Today literacy continues considered to be the primary means for gaining social prestige and economic wellbeing. This is why many organizations work to improve literacy. At one level, literacy means simply the ability to read and write. At another level, called functional literacy, it implies the process of extracting meaning from print and putting meaning into print. This is developed through formal schooling and beyond. Now, given that print literacy is not the central one that it once enjoyed, the question of multiple literacies and the ability to extract a common base of meaning from them has become a major area of research in psychology, education, linguistics, and semiotics; and it is in this context that Petcoff’s notion of “semioliteracy” comes into play, defined simply as the ability to handle or control all kinds of writing systems for encoding and deciphering meaning. Emoji literacy falls directly under this rubric. It is, de facto, a semioliteracy, since it entails knowing how to interrelate print writing and pictographic-ideographic signs and to use them integratively, not separately. Of course, the acquisition of traditional print literacy is still crucial for gaining access to many domains of society, especially those requiring the ability to write proficiently, including professional and specialized areas. But emoji literacy is now, at the very least, a complementary form of writing.

Petcoff’s genial idea is to use emoji literacy as a platform on which students, who already are proficient in it outside the classroom, can build traditional academic literacy skills, transferring their emoji skills to the academic domain. The reason why this is even possible in the first place is that the emoji code is a self-contained semiotic code that is used to communicate all kinds of meanings visually.

David Crystal (2012) has claimed that understanding how society views new literacies, each one contextualized according to socio-communicative function, is important for educators because it is having an impact on all kinds of social processes. In schools, it is not uncommon for educators and students to be given the choice to move back and forth between literacies. Also, through online discussions, students and instructors have become participants in the use of new literacy practices. Emoji have become intrinsic to writing styles and practices across digital media and platforms, and the stock of emoji is constantly being enlarged in response to changing communicative needs and social trends across the world. Emoji have, in effect, become part of all kinds of discourses, from the everyday written conversational practices in text messages and tweets, to persuasive discourses in advertising and political campaigning. Because of their ubiquity, we no longer perceive emoji as exceptional, or as simply adding visual reinforcement to the meaning of verbal texts; rather, we now see them as distinct signifying structures, chosen from keyboards or apps, to complement, supplement, and even substitute verbal writing. This has had many implications for how we understand communication today, how we express our thoughts, and how we react to texts.

In cyberspace there are ever-growing hybrid literacies and textualities that cut across modes and genres, with an emphasis on collaborative creativity and re-mixing. As Michael Halliday (1985: 82) predicted a while back: “When new demands are made on language, it changes in response to them … We are making language work for us in ways it never had to do before, it will have to become a different language in order to cope.” Digital literacy also entails vernacular literacy – knowledge of how different languages or jargons now interact online – and information literacy – knowledge of how to mine information from the Internet and appropriate it for communicative practices. Students now bring all this to the classroom, and to ignore it would be counterproductive pedagogically.

Unlike the Print Age, as McLuhan (1962) also called the age that crystallized with the invention of the printing press, which encouraged, and even imposed, the exclusive use of alphabetic writing in most forms of communication and knowledge-making, the current Internet Age, encourages various modes of writing in tandem with alphabetic scripts. Of course, not all forms of writing are emoji-based, especially in areas such as academia, science, journalism, law-making, and the like; emoji writing is typically limited to the informal register and used largely to impart a subjective tone to texts, tweets, and the like. Second, emoji writing depends on technology, with emoji characters just a click away; without this easy accessibility, it is unlikely that emoji would have spread so broadly. Indeed, emoji writing allows for an easy way to add emotional tones, from happiness and laughter to irony and criticism, to messages. Tone can, of course, be conveyed through words and stylistic modulations, but it is much easier to do so by selecting an emoji from a keyboard, app, or website. As Petcoff argues, all this can be exploited fruitfully in the classroom, simply by making emoji a basis on which to build the more formal type of literacy.

In sum, reading this book is enlightening in more ways than one. It is a treatise on semioliteracy; it is a manual on how to incorporate emoji pedagogically into literacy education; and it is an indirect psychological analysis of the modern literate mind, which is no longer just alphabetic in its constitution, but broadly semiotic, that is based on the integration of different codes. It is a truly masterful exposition of that mind and how, in the case of challenged students, how best to cultivate it in the current era. Training young people today to be literate is of some urgency, as Margaret Atwood (2012) has so eloquently put it: “If there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.” Access to the minds of those young readers and writers is through the literacy they know best, at present – hence the tremendous importance of Petcoff’s book.

Marcel Danesi

University of Toronto