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Speaker 1: Could you still pass an NCEEA literacy exam on reading

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Speaker 1: if you had to break down the underlying meaning of memes?

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Speaker 1: Do you even know what a meme is? I know, right,

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Speaker 1: this is exactly what we're asking of the year ten

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Speaker 1: students as part of their exam. The question our students

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Speaker 1: to read four memes and discuss which two had the

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Speaker 1: most similar underlying meanings. Doctor Julia Debress is a socio

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Speaker 1: linguist and with us.

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Speaker 2: Now, hey, Julia, good evening.

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Speaker 1: Are you into this?

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Speaker 2: Am I into it?

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Speaker 1: Yeah?

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Speaker 2: I love it. I think I was extremely surprised and

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Speaker 2: I would say delighted by its development in the exam,

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Speaker 2: especially in the week when we have the government telling

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Speaker 2: young people that they're going to have to be learning

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Speaker 2: Shakespeare and Chaucer and Dante, and at the same time,

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Speaker 2: in an exam they're being asked to analyze memes. The

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Speaker 2: contrast is I think quite poetic.

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Speaker 1: But it's a reading exam. We're asking them to look

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Speaker 1: at a picture that doesn't feel right. Shouldn't we be

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Speaker 1: asking them to read something in a reading exam?

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Speaker 2: I mean, I think there probably were a several questions.

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Speaker 2: I haven't seen the exam. I've just heard about it

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Speaker 2: from some of the young people who did it. But

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Speaker 2: I think that you can think of memes as being

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Speaker 2: a kind of you know, there's a history that goes

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Speaker 2: back from memes towards things like analyzing advertisements that I

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Speaker 2: remember doing in the nineties at high school, static images

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Speaker 2: they called them at that time, analyzing political cartoons. There's

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Speaker 2: kind of a whole range of genres of text plus

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Speaker 2: image that have been around for a while and I

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Speaker 2: think are a really important part of our of our

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Speaker 2: everyday life.

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Speaker 1: Not a memes have Not all memes have text, do they?

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Speaker 2: I think? Well, indeed, the big question about what even

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Speaker 2: is a meme, I think a lot of us think

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Speaker 2: of memes as involving an image with text overlaid. That's

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Speaker 2: kind of the prototypical example that memes can also be

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Speaker 2: on TikTok, they can be a video, they can usually

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Speaker 2: there is a combination of language plus visuals. But apparently

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Speaker 2: the key feature of you know, to really define a

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Speaker 2: meme is just that it's it's digital, and it's designed

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Speaker 2: to be shared and kind of adapted and move around

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Speaker 2: in that kind of viral way.

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Speaker 1: We're not just doing this to help out the kids

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Speaker 1: who are really struggling with reading by just giving them

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Speaker 1: some pictures, are.

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Speaker 2: We well, no, yeah, that's interesting because I do think

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Speaker 2: that there have been different reactions to this exam and

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Speaker 2: I would say that I've seen about three different reactions.

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Speaker 2: These ones like my kids was like, oh, yeah, totally normal.

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Speaker 2: That's part of our life. So she didn't find it

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Speaker 2: odd at all. One of her friends is you know,

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Speaker 2: it's a fourteen year old who's saying, what is this

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Speaker 2: dumbed down stuff that we're being taught at school? You know,

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Speaker 2: So there is a scene in which some kids do

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Speaker 2: feel like this isn't prop up stuff we should be

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Speaker 2: learning at school. For me, I have a third perspect

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Speaker 2: where yes, I am surprised, but I also think, wow,

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Speaker 2: this is really interesting and I think youthful. I think

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Speaker 2: that means learning to understand and use means is actually

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Speaker 2: a really important part of our digital literacy these days,

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Speaker 2: and something that you need to learn that's actually quite

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Speaker 2: hard to read a meme I think of.

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Speaker 1: It, Well, I still don't know what half of them mean.

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Speaker 1: It's really good to talk to you, doctor, Julia Debress

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Speaker 1: socio Linguists.

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