Abstract
This study examines educational videos published on Instagram by Polish teachers of Italian as a foreign language, adopting a multimodal approach based on the three metafunctions identified by Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006): representational, interactive, and compositional. The corpus comprises 20 videos selected from the feeds of five teacher-influencers. The analysis reveals that the content predominantly focuses on phraseological expressions and aspects of linguistic form, with limited attention to situational context and no explicit indication of CEFR levels. The interactive function is characterised by the teacher’s strong visual presence, mainly in close-up shots, establishing a relationship of proximity with learners-followers. Regarding compositional aspects, the videos appear technologically modest, lacking animations, external clips, or authentic Italian materials. All videos rely exclusively on content presentation without interactive activities, raising questions about their pedagogical effectiveness as autonomous learning tools and suggesting their potential role as supplementary materials within more structured learning paths.
Keywords
Microlearning, Instagram, Italian as a foreign language, multimodal analysis, teacher-influencer