Dr Julia De Bres: Sociolinguist on NCEA exam which included deciphering memes

In a recent NCEA literacy exam, Year 10 students were asked to read four memes and discuss which two had the most similar underlying themes. 

Sociolinguist Julia de Bres told Heather du Plessis-Allan “I was extremely surprised and delighted by this development.” 

De Bres said “You can think of memes as ‘static images’ - ads, and cartoons have been around for a while.” 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Could you still pass an NCEEA literacy exam on reading
if you had to break down the underlying meaning of memes?
Do you even know what a meme is? I know, right,
this is exactly what we're asking of the year ten
students as part of their exam. The question our students
to read four memes and discuss which two had the
most similar underlying meanings. Doctor Julia Debress is a socio

(00:20):
linguist and with us.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Now, hey, Julia, good evening.

Speaker 1 (00:24):
Are you into this?

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Am I into it?

Speaker 1 (00:27):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (00:27):
I love it. I think I was extremely surprised and
I would say delighted by its development in the exam,
especially in the week when we have the government telling
young people that they're going to have to be learning
Shakespeare and Chaucer and Dante, and at the same time,
in an exam they're being asked to analyze memes. The
contrast is I think quite poetic.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
But it's a reading exam. We're asking them to look
at a picture that doesn't feel right. Shouldn't we be
asking them to read something in a reading exam?

Speaker 2 (00:55):
I mean, I think there probably were a several questions.
I haven't seen the exam. I've just heard about it
from some of the young people who did it. But
I think that you can think of memes as being
a kind of you know, there's a history that goes
back from memes towards things like analyzing advertisements that I
remember doing in the nineties at high school, static images
they called them at that time, analyzing political cartoons. There's

(01:16):
kind of a whole range of genres of text plus
image that have been around for a while and I
think are a really important part of our of our
everyday life.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
Not a memes have Not all memes have text, do they?

Speaker 2 (01:29):
I think? Well, indeed, the big question about what even
is a meme, I think a lot of us think
of memes as involving an image with text overlaid. That's
kind of the prototypical example that memes can also be
on TikTok, they can be a video, they can usually
there is a combination of language plus visuals. But apparently
the key feature of you know, to really define a

(01:49):
meme is just that it's it's digital, and it's designed
to be shared and kind of adapted and move around
in that kind of viral way.

Speaker 1 (01:57):
We're not just doing this to help out the kids
who are really struggling with reading by just giving them
some pictures, are.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
We well, no, yeah, that's interesting because I do think
that there have been different reactions to this exam and
I would say that I've seen about three different reactions.
These ones like my kids was like, oh, yeah, totally normal.
That's part of our life. So she didn't find it
odd at all. One of her friends is you know,
it's a fourteen year old who's saying, what is this
dumbed down stuff that we're being taught at school? You know,

(02:23):
So there is a scene in which some kids do
feel like this isn't prop up stuff we should be
learning at school. For me, I have a third perspect
where yes, I am surprised, but I also think, wow,
this is really interesting and I think youthful. I think
that means learning to understand and use means is actually
a really important part of our digital literacy these days,
and something that you need to learn that's actually quite

(02:43):
hard to read a meme I think of.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
It, Well, I still don't know what half of them mean.
It's really good to talk to you, doctor, Julia Debress
socio Linguists.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
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