Emoticons, a form of paralanguage, are symbols made up of characters available on a keyboard. They normally represent emotions, such as happiness or anger. Emoticons are also available on chat sites as small symbols, normally faces.

Example
: ) is happy, (:-$ is sick, :-@ is screaming.

In the classroom

Focusing on emoticons as a feature of text will help learners understand authentic materials from the worldwide web or e-mail. Students can practise writing messages to each other using emoticons.