2026 IJRSE – Volume 15 Issue 6
Available Online: 9 March 2026
Author/s:
Baac, Marie Bernardine G.
Leyte Normal University, Philippines (2002840@lnu.edu.ph)
Abstract:
Educational entertainment in today’s world plays a significant role in honing children’s language acquisition and literacy. Through the integration of entertainment and instruction, programs like such create learning more engaging, multimodal, and accessible for young learners who are exposed to visual and interactive media. This study explored the animated educational entertainment series WordWorld to determine its multimodal structure, influence on functional literacy, and strategies for reinforcing vocabulary teaching. Guided by the Vocabulary Knowledge Framework and the Multimodal Theory, the research analyzed three selected episodes from the series, namely, Pig’s Big Moonlight Feast, Robots to the Rescue!, and The Race to Mystery Island. The study followed a qualitative, descriptive-interpretive design focusing on how multiple modes present in the animated series interact to reinforce vocabulary teaching. The findings revealed that WordWorld holds five communicative modes – linguistic mode, visual mode, aural mode, gestural mode, and spatial mode. These modes significantly contributed to multiple meaning-making functions, including navigation, content presentation, visual cohesion, layout, emphasis, legibility and readability, and aesthetic appeal. Altogether, these functions facilitate in teaching words towards learners supported with contextualized vocabulary and promotion for functional literacy.
Keywords: animated edutainment, functional literacy, multimodal analysis, vocabulary teaching, WordWorld
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5861/ijrse.2026.26808
Cite this article:
Baac, M. B. G. (2026). Animated edutainment as a vocabulary teaching material: A corpus-based study on WordWorld. International Journal of Research Studies in Education, 15(6), 81-89. https://doi.org/10.5861/ijrse.2026.26808