The most common graphicons in Mexican Spanish speaking WhatsApp communities composed of school parents

Abstract

Abstract The present study examined the pragmatic functions of graphicons used in six different WhatsApp communities created by and for school parents, written in Mexican Spanish, which had the purpose of sharing information relating to daily classroom concerns. A total of 4,824 WhatsApp messages written by these 143 school parents were analyzed using the taxonomy proposed by Herring and Dainas (2017, Nice picture comment! Graphicons in Facebook comment threads. In: Proceedings of the Fifthieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE Press, pp. 2185–2194. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/41419). The findings revealed that emoji were the most common graphical device used and they were always visually connected to the verbal content of the speech acts they accompanied. Another result showed that photos were the second most preferred multimodal. These photos were impersonal and as well as emoji, they fulfilled requested tasks as this was a task-oriented group. The findings further suggested that the low frequency of the occurrence of stickers, videos, and GIFS was probably due to the particularities of this community of practice. Thus, the use of emoji and graphicons were constrained by the requested tasks of these communities.