The researchers applied PRISMA-based selection criteria, screening studies from databases including Scopus, Web of Science, JSTOR, and Google Scholar. Only peer-reviewed empirical work made the cut, and a thematic synthesis was then used to identify patterns across the findings. This methodological rigor matters because systematic reviews are only as reliable as the criteria used to include or exclude studies. By anchoring the process in PRISMA, the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses, the authors ensured that the sixteen studies represent a transparent, reproducible evidence base rather than a cherry-picked collection of favorable results.

The clearest signal from the synthesis concerns reading. Across the reviewed studies, platforms like WeChat enhanced reading engagement and comprehension through three mechanisms: authentic texts, peer interaction, and multimodal input. Authentic texts refer to real-world materials that learners encounter outside the classroom, from news articles to social media posts, rather than simplified textbook passages. Peer interaction allows students to negotiate meaning together, asking questions and clarifying misunderstandings in real time. Multimodal input, meanwhile, combines text with images, voice messages, and video, engaging multiple channels of processing simultaneously. Together, these affordances create what the authors describe as interactive environments that support deeper comprehension than traditional reading assignments alone.

These findings align with established theories of second language acquisition. The review draws on Vygotskian ideas of social interaction as a driver of learning, suggesting that the group chat format of WeChat functions as a digital zone of proximal development, where learners scaffold one another’s understanding. Related work in mobile-assisted language learning, or MALL, has documented similar effects for platforms like WhatsApp, with studies showing measurable gains in L2 reading comprehension. The WeChat evidence extends this pattern to a platform with different technical affordances, including voice messaging, official accounts that push curated content, and robust group management tools that instructors can repurpose for pedagogical ends.

Translation learning tells a more complicated story. The review found that evidence for translation outcomes is limited and uneven, focusing mainly on vocabulary support and informal practices, with little emphasis on structured pedagogy. In other words, students use WeChat and similar platforms to look up words, share machine translation outputs, and practice translation informally, but instructors rarely integrate these activities into systematic translation instruction. One study of Saudi translation teachers and students found that WeChat was viewed as a useful supplementary tool for teaching translation, yet the platform’s role remained supplementary rather than central. This gap between informal use and structured pedagogy is one of the review’s most important contributions, highlighting where future research and curriculum design should focus.

Machine translation on social media platforms raises additional questions. The reviewed literature includes evaluations of the accuracy of machine translation systems embedded in social media language environments, alongside studies of how students perceive and use these tools. Research on Instagram’s translation feature, for example, examined whether it helps students learn Arabic-Indonesian translation, while other work explored how computer self-efficacy influences college students’ intention to use translation technologies, with learning motivation and cognitive engagement playing mediating roles. These studies suggest that the psychological factors surrounding translation technology use are as important as the technology itself, a finding that has implications for how instructors introduce machine translation into language classrooms.

Learner motivation emerges as the thread connecting reading, translation, and engagement across the review. The authors identify autonomy, social presence, and interactive environments as the primary drivers of motivation in WeChat-mediated learning. Autonomy refers to learners’ ability to control when, where, and how they engage with English content, a form of self-directed learning that informal digital environments uniquely support. Social presence captures the feeling of being connected to real people rather than studying in isolation, which reduces language anxiety and increases willingness to communicate. Interactive environments provide immediate feedback and dynamic content, keeping learners engaged over time. This motivational framework echoes the L2 Motivational Self System, a widely cited model in applied linguistics that links learners’ ideal selves to their language learning behavior.

The review’s novelty lies in integrating reading, translation, and motivation into a single analytical frame, highlighting the link between platform affordances and pedagogical choices. Rather than treating WeChat as a generic learning tool, the authors show that specific technical features, such as group chats, voice messages, and official accounts, map onto specific learning outcomes. This affordance-based perspective has practical implications for instructors deciding how to incorporate social media into their courses. A reading class might leverage official accounts to push authentic content, while a translation course might use group chats for peer feedback on translation drafts. The alignment between feature and outcome is what separates purposeful integration from haphazard adoption.

However, the authors are candid about the limitations of the evidence base. The reviewed studies used heterogeneous designs, relied heavily on self-reported data, and included only a small number of translation-focused studies, all of which limit generalizability. Self-reported measures, such as surveys and interviews, capture learners’ perceptions but not necessarily their actual behavior or learning gains. The small number of translation studies means that conclusions about translation learning rest on a thin foundation. The authors also note that the review did not generate or analyze datasets, reflecting its synthesis-based approach rather than a meta-analysis of quantitative effects.

Despite these limitations, the review arrives at a moment of rapid change in language education. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital tools in higher education, and studies of WeChat groups in China during the pandemic documented how these platforms supported not only language learning but also broader academic and social needs. As universities worldwide grapple with the role of social media in teaching and learning, this review offers a rigorous, evidence-based starting point. It suggests that WeChat and similar platforms are neither panaceas nor distractions, but tools whose effectiveness depends on how well instructors align platform affordances with pedagogical goals. For the millions of university students learning English through their phones, that alignment may make the difference between scrolling and studying.

Subject of Research: WeChat emerges as a powerful ally for university English learners, systematic review finds

Article Title: The role of WeChat in supporting university-level English language learning: a systematic review on reading, translation, and learner motivation

Article References: Xuelian, W., & bin Megat Zakaria, M. A. Z. (2026). The role of WeChat in supporting university-level English language learning: a systematic review on reading, translation, and learner motivation. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 360. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01611-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01611-5

Keywords: role, WeChat, supporting, university-level, English, language, learning, systematic, review, reading, translation, learner

Personification is a type of metaphor in which a non-human entity is treated as a person. English speakers do it all the time: “my car is temperamental” works because we can view a car’s engine as akin to a human mind—a complex, hidden controller whose moods produce unpredictable behavior. But Japanese offers personification metaphors like “my wallet is lonely,” where a wallet has no internal system resembling a mind at all. Franklin Chang of Kobe City University of Foreign Studies and Tomoko Tatsumi of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics set out to determine whether these culturally distinctive forms are actually easy for Japanese readers to understand, or whether they trip up comprehension just as they do for English speakers.

To characterize Japanese personification, the researchers spent years opportunistically collecting examples from television, internet videos, websites, and everyday life—much like early speech error corpora. They gathered 46 spoken and 13 written examples. A kindergarten teacher encourages a boy to eat by speaking of “Poor Carrot-san” who “feels lonely.” A mother consoles her adult daughter about a sold air conditioner by writing that it “was happy being taken care of by you” and hoping it will “do well with its next master.” A YouTuber amused viewers by asking “Tomato-chan and Lettuce-kun, why are you guys such close friends?” about sandwich ingredients stuck together. A veterinarian discussing a sick cat’s constipation remarked, “if Feces-chan gives us the benefit of coming out, then things will be more comfortable.” These examples routinely apply human titles—-san, -chan, -kun, -sama—to simple objects, and many appear in formal business contexts where English anthropomorphic idioms would be unusual.

Crucially, most of these expressions are not conventionalized idioms. Searching the National Diet Library Ngram corpus, which spans 2.3 million books and magazines with roughly 1.7 billion words, the team found that only 17 of their examples appeared with the inanimate argument in the corpus; the remaining 37 forms occurred only with human arguments. The researchers also mapped their dataset onto animacy ratings from VanArsdall and Blunt, who had English speakers judge 1,200 common nouns on features including the ability to think and goal-directedness. The objects in the Japanese anthropomorphic expressions—carrots, bread, belts, lettuce—clustered at the bottom left of the animacy space, rated as having almost no capacity for thought or goals, even compared with an ant or a computer. This is puzzling for standard personification theory, which assumes a mind-like element in the target: a car’s engine plays the role of a mind, but a slice of cheese has nothing comparable.

The authors propose an alternative: a group-based schema. The phrase “Tomato-chan and Lettuce-kun are close friends” activates the concept FRIENDS, a feature of HUMAN GROUP, which can be aligned with sandwich INGREDIENTS, where the corresponding concept is STUCK TOGETHER. This schema requires no mind-like internal element. The carrot is lonely because it is separated from the other foods in its group; the air conditioner is happy because it joins a new household. Japanese relational titles themselves reflect hierarchical group membership—-sama and -san for senior members, -chan and -kun for equals or juniors—so the same cultural logic explains both the emotions and the honorifics.

The team then designed story comprehension experiments based on methods from Nieuwland and Van Berkum’s discourse studies. Participants read five-sentence stories in which the fourth sentence was either literal or anthropomorphic. In one story, a depressed gambler tells a friend he lost all his money in one bet; the expected fourth sentence is “my wallet is empty,” while the unexpected version is “my wallet is crying.” Control stories created an expectation about animacy instead: a man realizes he forgot something in his car, and the expected sentence describes finding his bag while the unexpected one describes finding his dog. Critical sentences were matched in length within two characters, and true/false comprehension questions kept readers attentive. Japanese participants were recruited through Crowdworks and screened with culture and language questions drawn from the Japanese Language Proficiency Exam; English monolinguals came through Prolific.

The results were striking. In Experiment 1 with 64 Japanese and 61 English participants, English readers were significantly slower at the fourth sentence when it was anthropomorphic than when it was literal, but Japanese readers showed no difference at all. Japanese readers did slow down for the control stories, where an animate entity violated an animacy expectation—showing they were generating expectations and were sensitive to surprise. Corpus frequency analyses ruled out a simple explanation: in Japanese, the literal forms were on average more than 365 times as frequent as the anthropomorphic forms, yet Japanese speakers read both equally fast. In English, the anthropomorphic forms had essentially zero frequency in the NGRAMs database, and English readers struggled with them.

Experiment 2 replicated the finding with new participants—67 Japanese and 69 English speakers—and 50 percent more stories, including items from formal settings such as a veterinarian and a kimono dresser. The pattern held: a significant four-way interaction showed that the lack of an expectation difference for anthropomorphic stories was unique to Japanese readers. A combined analysis pooling 261 participants and analyzing only first exposures confirmed the result, and the authors note that the direction of the effect in the Japanese anthropomorphic condition was actually reversed, making a power explanation implausible.

These findings contradict both major accounts. Dependency theories of comprehension, which predict difficulty whenever arguments and predicates mismatch—and which are supported by ERP evidence like the P600 for inanimate subjects of active transitive verbs—predict trouble in both languages. Anthropomorphism theories, grounded in universal biases like elicited agent knowledge and effectance, predict ease in both languages. Instead, the results support a Culture account: Japanese readers appear to possess culturally specific schemas, such as a group-based personification schema, that let them apply human predicates to simple non-moving objects with no processing cost. The authors point to possible cultural background factors, including Shinto beliefs in kami residing within inanimate objects called shintai, the tradition of “married” rocks and trees, and Buddhist kuyō funeral rites for dolls, needles, glasses, and even robot dogs—ceremonies with roots reaching back to a needle funeral hall established in Kyoto by 881. Yet they caution that modern survey data show few Japanese report religious affiliation, and evidence about collectivism is mixed, so the precise cultural mechanisms remain open questions.

What emerges is a vivid demonstration that culture-specific conceptual knowledge can change the very mechanics of sentence comprehension. English speakers can eventually work out what a lonely wallet means, but the processing cost is real and measurable in reading time. Japanese speakers treat the same expression as unremarkable, as ordinary as “my wallet is empty.” The mind, it turns out, does not process metaphor in a cultural vacuum—and somewhere in Japan, a wallet may be lonely without costing anyone a millisecond of surprise.

Subject of Research: Lonely wallets: differences in comprehending anthropomorphic language in Japanese and English

Article Title: Lonely wallets: differences in comprehending anthropomorphic language in Japanese and English

Article References: Chang, F., & Tatsumi, T. (2026). Lonely wallets: differences in comprehending anthropomorphic language in Japanese and English. Frontiers in Language Sciences, 5, Article 1845613. https://doi.org/10.3389/flang.2026.1845613

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/flang.2026.1845613

Keywords: Lonely, wallets, differences, comprehending, anthropomorphic, language, Japanese, English, scientific research

The study, titled “Socio-Culturally Responsive VR Training for Enhancing English Teachers’ Pragmatic Competence,” was conducted by researchers Mohsen Mahmoudi-Dehaki and Nasim Nasr-Esfahani. Published online on August 27, 2026, in the journal ECNU Review of Education, the work focuses on the specific challenges faced by educators in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts. In these environments, opportunities for authentic, real-world interaction are often limited, making it difficult for teachers to practice context-sensitive communication repeatedly.

Pragmatic competence is defined as the ability to use language appropriately in real-world situations. For instance, a request, refusal, apology, or complaint can be expressed in numerous grammatically correct ways. However, the most appropriate choice depends heavily on factors such as the social relationship between speakers, power dynamics, social distance, and cultural expectations. Traditional classroom instruction can explain these pragmatic rules, but providing repeated opportunities to practice them in realistic, high-stakes situations remains a significant challenge for teacher education programs.

To investigate whether immersive technology could address this pedagogical gap, the researchers employed a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design. The study involved 122 randomly selected EFL teachers who participated in a comprehensive 108-hour intervention. This program utilized fully immersive VR simulations featuring artificial intelligence (AI)-driven avatars. The simulations were designed to incorporate diverse sociocultural scenarios, varying speech acts, power relations, and levels of social distance, ensuring that the training was not merely linguistic but deeply contextual.

The intervention followed a human-on-the-loop (HOTL) approach, which maintains human involvement in the AI-supported learning process. This design choice was critical in ensuring that the technology served as a facilitator of learning rather than a replacement for human interaction. Participants completed verbal discourse completion tasks (DCTs) both before and after the training period. These tasks allowed the researchers to quantitatively assess changes in the teachers’ pragmatic competence, specifically looking at their ability to navigate complex social and cultural expectations.

The results of the study demonstrated that participants achieved statistically significant improvements in pragmatic competence following the 108-hour training program. These gains were evident in two key dimensions: pragmalinguistic accuracy and sociopragmatic appropriateness. Pragmalinguistic accuracy refers to the ability to select and use appropriate linguistic forms, while sociopragmatic appropriateness relates to the ability to respond in a manner that aligns with the social and cultural expectations of a given situation. The data suggests that the immersive environment effectively targeted both the structural and social aspects of language use.

Qualitative data gathered through focus group interviews provided further insight into the mechanisms behind these improvements. Participants identified several key factors that contributed to their enhanced competence. These included immersive engagement, which kept learners focused and present in the simulated scenarios; real-time adaptive feedback, which allowed for immediate correction and learning; and increased communicative confidence. Additionally, teachers reported greater metapragmatic awareness, meaning they became more conscious of the pragmatic rules governing their speech, and engaged in reflective practice, analyzing why certain choices were appropriate in specific contexts.

The researchers emphasize that the value of the VR intervention lay not simply in the fact that teachers were practicing English in a virtual environment. Rather, the simulations created specific opportunities for participants to make communicative choices within sociocultural situations. By receiving adaptive feedback and reflecting on the appropriateness of their choices, teachers were able to internalize the complex social rules of English communication. This approach distinguishes the study from previous uses of VR in language education, which have often focused on conventional exercises rather than sociocultural responsiveness.

It is important to note that the researchers do not propose VR as a replacement for human interaction or conventional teacher education. Instead, they suggest that immersive technology can serve as an additional environment for professional learning. This is particularly relevant in EFL contexts where authentic interaction opportunities are constrained. The integration of AI-driven interaction with a socio-culturally responsive approach allows for a scalable and repeatable training environment that can be tailored to various social and cultural scenarios, providing a level of practice that is difficult to achieve in traditional classroom settings.

While the findings are promising, the researchers note that further research is needed to determine the long-term sustainability of these improvements. Specifically, it remains to be seen how effectively skills developed in immersive simulations transfer to teachers’ real-world professional and classroom interactions over time. The study contributes to the growing body of research on technology-enhanced language teacher education by demonstrating the potential of immersive, AI-supported environments. It highlights the importance of combining technological innovation with sociocultural awareness, adaptive feedback, and reflective practice when designing professional learning experiences for educators.

Subject of Research: Education

Article Title: Virtual reality helps English teachers strengthen the social side of language

Article References: Virtual reality helps English teachers strengthen the social side of language. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Virtual Reality, Language Education, Pragmatic Competence, Teacher Training, AI in Education, Virtual, reality, helps, English, teachers, strengthen, social

The research, published in the journal Behavior Research Methods by Beatriz Bermúdez-Margaretto of the University of Salamanca and colleagues, collected valence and arousal ratings for more than 2,000 English words from over 600 Spanish-speaking college students learning English as a foreign language, or EFL. Valence captures how pleasant or unpleasant a word feels, ranging from deeply negative to strongly positive, while arousal measures the intensity of the emotional reaction it provokes, from calming to invigorating. These two dimensions form the backbone of the circumplex model of affect, one of the most influential frameworks in emotion research, and they have been systematically catalogued for English native speakers since the landmark Affective Norms for English Words dataset created by Margaret Bradley and Peter Lang in 1999.

What has been missing, the authors argue, is an equivalent resource for the enormous population of learners whose exposure to a second language is confined to formal, instructional settings. Previous research has consistently shown that bilinguals process emotional language differently from monolinguals, and that the gap between a first and second language can be striking. Physiological studies have found reduced skin-conductance responses to emotional phrases in a second language, eye-tracking experiments reveal muted pupillary reactions to affective words, and surveys of multilinguals famously report that swearwords feel blunted and clinical when spoken in a tongue learned late. Yet most existing second-language norms have been collected from immersed bilinguals, people living and studying inside the language community, whose daily experiences knit emotional associations into the new lexicon in ways that classroom learners rarely replicate.

To fill that gap, the Spanish research team recruited a large, homogeneous and representative sample of university students whose English instruction had taken place almost entirely in classrooms. Participants rated each word on nine-point scales for valence and arousal, following procedures similar to those used in earlier norming projects. The researchers also gathered proficiency data using the LexTALE lexical test and detailed language-history information through the Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire, allowing them to characterize a population that is statistically unusual in the bilingualism literature: late learners, embedded in a Spanish-dominant society, whose contact with English is bounded by lessons, textbooks and sporadic media consumption.

The psychometric quality of the resulting database proved robust. Reliability analyses and checks against external validity benchmarks indicated that both the valence and arousal dimensions behaved as established affective measures should, with ratings for known positive and negative words falling where theory predicts. The team then performed the analysis that gives the dataset its scientific punch: direct comparisons between the new EFL norms, existing ratings from immersed learners of English as an additional language, and native English speaker norms drawn from the massive Warriner, Kuperman and Brysbaert database of more than 13,000 English lemmas. Those comparisons revealed systematic patterns rather than random noise, indicating that the learning environment itself leaves measurable fingerprints on how emotional content is represented in the mental lexicon.

Two findings stand out. First, the discrepancy between native speaker ratings and EFL learner ratings grew systematically as a function of affective, lexical and sensory experience factors. In other words, the emotional dimensions of a word were not distorted uniformly; the divergence tracked properties such as how strongly the word engages emotion, how familiar and frequent it is, how early in life it is typically acquired, and how much it appeals to the senses. This pattern is consistent with grounded and embodied accounts of cognition, which hold that word meanings are scaffolded on sensory and motor experience. A classroom learner simply accumulates fewer embodied encounters with an English word than a native speaker does, and the deficit appears to scale with exactly those experience-dependent factors.

Second, and perhaps most strikingly, the gap was particularly pronounced in the arousal dimension. While valence judgments, the basic pleasantness of a word, remained relatively well aligned between learners and native speakers, the felt intensity of emotionally charged words was substantially attenuated in the instructional-setting sample. This points to emotional intensity as a critical ingredient in the acquisition and use of emotional language. Words learned through arousing, personally resonant experiences appear to acquire a physiological charge that classroom exposure struggles to reproduce. The finding dovetails with a growing body of evidence that the second language functions as a kind of emotional dampener, but it refines the picture by suggesting that what is dampened is chiefly arousal, the bodily component of emotion, rather than the evaluative component.

The methodological care underlying these conclusions deserves emphasis. The authors note that earlier comparable datasets suffered from subtle scale-direction confusions, and they deliberately standardized their procedures to avoid such artifacts. They also documented which words failed to gather sufficient valid observations, showing that rarer, later-acquired words were more likely to be reported as unknown by participants, an honest accounting of the vocabulary limits of an instructional population. All individual and averaged ratings, together with the study materials, have been released through the Open Science Framework, making the resource immediately usable by other researchers. Analyses were conducted in the open-source statistical package JASP, and the study, while not preregistered, was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of the University of Salamanca.

Why does this matter beyond the laboratory? Affective norms are the raw material of experimental psychology. Researchers designing studies of memory, attention, decision-making or reading rely on them to select stimuli, and using native speaker norms with learner populations risks systematic error, since a word the experimenter believes is arousing may register as flat to the participants. The new database gives scientists studying EFL populations a calibrated instrument for the first time at this scale, joining a growing international effort that has produced affective norms for Chinese, Dutch, German as a second language, Spanish and many other linguistic contexts. For educators, the implications are more practical still. Previous work by members of the same team found that EFL textbooks are strikingly poor in emotionally charged vocabulary, and the arousal gap documented here suggests a concrete mechanism by which that poverty limits learning. Teaching strategies that deliberately weave emotional intensity into vocabulary instruction, through personal narratives, vivid contexts and embodied activities, may help classroom learners close the gap that immersion closes naturally.

The study also resonates with a broader scientific debate about the relationship between language and emotion. Whether emotions are biologically basic categories, as classical theories propose, or constructed from linguistic and cultural ingredients, as psychological constructionist accounts argue, the new data show empirically that the linguistic environment in which a word is acquired shapes its emotional profile. Emotion semantics have been shown to exhibit both universal structure and cultural variation, and the Salamanca findings add an environmental variable to that equation: not just which language you speak, but where and how you learned it. For the world’s classroom-trained multilinguals, who vastly outnumber immersed bilinguals, the message of this research is both humbling and empowering. Their foreign-language words do carry less emotional voltage than their mother-tongue equivalents, and that asymmetry influences memory, moral judgment and everyday communication. But the asymmetry is measurable, tractable and, the authors suggest, addressable, provided that researchers and teachers design language experiences with the emotional intensity that the human lexicon seems to require.

Subject of Research: Affective norms for emotional word processing in college learners of English as a foreign language

Article Title: Emotion in English as a foreign language: Affective ratings for over 2,000 words by college learners

Article References: Bermúdez-Margaretto, B., Pérez-García, E., Fernandez, A., & Sánchez, M. J. (2026). Emotion in English as a foreign language: Affective ratings for over 2,000 words by college learners. Behavior Research Methods, 58(10), Article 291. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-026-03159-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3758/s13428-026-03159-x

Keywords: affective norms, valence, arousal, English as a foreign language, bilingualism, emotional word processing, second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, language learning, classroom learners, Emotion, English