Table Of ContentHUMOR IN THE CLASSROOM
Humor in the Classroom provides practical, research-based answers to questions that
educational researchers and language teachers might have about the social and
cognitive benefits that humor and language play afford in classroom discourse
and additional language learning. The book considers the ways in which humor,
language play, and creativity can construct new possibilities for classroom identity,
critique prevailing norms, and reconfigure particular relations of power. Humor in
the Classroom encourages educational researchers and language teachers to take a
fresh look at the workings of humor in today’s linguistically diverse classrooms and
makes the argument for its role in building a stronger foundation for studies of
classroom discourse, theories of additional language development, and approaches
to language pedagogy.
Nancy D. Bell is an associate professor at Washington State University.
Anne Pomerantz is a senior lecturer in educational linguistics at the University
of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education.
This page intentionally left blank
HUMOR IN THE
CLASSROOM
A Guide for Language
Teachers and
Educational Researchers
Nancy D. Bell and Anne Pomerantz
Washington State University and University of
Pennsylvania
First published 2016
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 Taylor & Francis
The right of Nancy D. Bell and Anne Pomerantz to be identified as authors of
this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without
intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bell, Nancy (Nancy Dolores)
Humor in the classroom : a guide for language teachers and educational
researchers / Nancy D. Bell and Anne Pomerantz, Washington State
University and Pennsylvania State University.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Language and languages—Study and teaching. 2. Language and
languages—Humor. 3. Wit and humor in education. 4. Teaching—
Humor. 5. Teacher-student relationships. 6. Classroom
management. 7. Language and education—Psychological
aspects. 8. Classroom environment—Psychological aspects. I. Pomerantz,
Anne, author. II. Title.
P53.43.B25 2015
418.0071—dc23
2015003319
ISBN: 978-0-415-64053-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-64054-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-08269-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
Preface vi
Acknowledgments xvi
1 Language, Communication, and Education 1
2 Humor and Language Play 22
3 Understanding Classroom Talk 50
4 Playing It Safe 69
5 Humor, Learning, and Additional Language Development 100
6 Teachers and Humor: Weighing the Risks and Benefits 130
7 Teaching With Humor 153
8 Teaching About Humor 166
9 Researching Humor and Language Play 184
Appendix: Transcription Conventions 201
Index 203
PREFACE
This is a book about the role of humor and language play in classroom discourse
and additional language learning. If you expect it to be funny, put it down now.
That’s right, put it down. Shut it. Don’t read another page. This is an academic
book. And, as you know, humor and play have no place in the serious business of
scholarship, let alone language education. Or do they?
The purpose of this book is to revisit this and other misconceptions about
funny, playful, and otherwise unconventional talk, particularly as they relate to
how we understand language use, language learning, and language teaching in
educational spaces. Although we hope that you will find this book at least mildly
entertaining, our purpose is not merely to amuse. In the pages that follow, we
argue for serious consideration of non-serious language as a way to align our
work as language teachers and educational researchers with contemporary schol-
arship on classroom discourse and additional language learning.
Language Education as Serious Business
Talk around education tends to be serious and when that talk is about language
education, it can often hit a fever pitch. Consider the following excerpts from
recent news stories:
Uncle Sam certainly talks a lot, just not in enough languages. A Senate panel
examined the language deficit during a hearing Monday on “A National
Security Crisis: Foreign Language Capabilities in the Federal Government.”
Sen. Daniel K. Akaka (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Senate Homeland Secu-
rity and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on government management
and the federal workforce, said national security agencies “continue to
Preface vii
experience shortages of people skilled in hard-to-learn languages due to a
limited pool of Americans to recruit from.”
(Davidson, 2012)
“English is a powerful platform for professional, cultural and economic
exchange,” says Christopher McCormick, senior VP of academic affairs at
Education First, but he added that there are several countries in the region
[Asia] that aren’t progressing with English proficiency in a pace that would
be necessary to maintain their international competitiveness. This is espe-
cially alarming as English proficiency is a key indicator of a nation’s eco-
nomic ability, with clear correlations between English skills and income,
quality of life, ease of doing business and international trade, the study notes.
(Maierbrugger, 2014)
Britain’s foreign languages skills are in crisis. During the past month alone,
ministers, university representatives, exam chiefs and industry bodies have
each voiced their concern as entries to degree and A-level modern foreign
language courses plummeted. So few young people are learning languages
that in 10 years’ time as many as 40% of university language departments
are likely to close.
(Ratcliffe, 2013)
New York City schools are broadly failing to meet the needs of many of their
thousands of students who are still learning English, and they must improve
or they may face sanctions, state education officials announced Wednesday.
(Otterman, 2011)
Within the United States and around the world language education seems to
be in perpetual crisis, with needs like national security readiness, greater global
economic competiveness, and more rigorous academic standards cited as the pri-
mary reasons for concern. At the same time, schools in immigrant receiving coun-
tries are consistently being chastised for their inability to meet the linguistic and
educational needs of newly arrived students. From Boston to Berlin, Sydney to
Shanghai, people are asking how to do education, and more specifically language
education, better—often in the face of increasing linguistic diversity in their class-
rooms and communities. New approaches to language pedagogy, it would seem,
are in order.
Yet, it’s not just this crisis talk that seems to foreground the serious nature of
language education. Guy Cook (2000) has carefully documented the dichotomy
between work and play that has emerged in modern educational settings, noting
viii Preface
how it gives rise to a view of humor, language play, and other forms of non-serious
language use, as at best distracting and at worst detrimental to language learning.
Moreover, Cook noted the tendency within language education to focus on utili-
tarian, transactional language use at the expense of all else:
Language teaching has in recent years often taken its cue from the work
needs of the student, and tried to replicate them within the classroom. In this
climate, although play persists, it is often severely marginalized and tends to
be used for some ephemeral pedagogic purpose—such as ‘getting the class
in the right mood’.
(2000, p. 183, emphasis added)
Particularly striking here is the presumption among many language educators and
materials developers that the “work needs of the student” would neither privilege
nor include non-serious language use, as sociolinguistic examinations of work-
place interaction have shown just the opposite. Conversational joking, humorous
refusals, and playful teases, for example, feature just as heavily in the talk of chil-
dren on the playground, as they do in the talk of adults in the workplace. Yet, it
is not just the ubiquity of humor and language play that merits our attention as
language teachers and educational researchers. A focus on these forms of language
use is key to expanding our students’ communicative repertoires and indeed, as
we argue throughout this book, their overall understanding of language. In our
everyday lives we draw on non-serious language to
• build relationships and establish rapport with others;
• mitigate face threats, relieve tension, and release emotions;
• subvert, resist, or critique social norms and conventions (albeit often in a safe
or deniable fashion); and
• highlight or redraw certain relations of power.
If anything, humor and language play are an integral part of the work we do to
indicate who we are and what we are doing within and through social interaction.
And, in linguistically diverse spaces, the presence of multiple languages seems to
amplify the possibilities for humor, play, and creativity, as participants are presented
with broader, although not necessarily equitably distributed, repertoires of com-
municative resources.
Humor in the Classroom
The topic of this book, humor in the classroom, is likely very familiar to you,
whether you are a language teacher, educational researcher, or additional language
learner. Yet, as this is an academic text, we must take a moment to define some terms.
Preface ix
What Is Humor?
In our work, we follow Kuipers (2008) in seeing humor as “a quintessentially
social phenomenon” (p. 361). Although we reference throughout this text humor’s
many psychological dimensions, as language teachers and educational research-
ers grounded in the field of applied linguistics, we are primarily concerned with
how people construct particular actions, utterances, and occurrences as funny or
serious. That is, we begin from the premise that humor is constructed within
and through interaction. Put another way, we think of humor as not residing
within particular bits of language, but rather as an emergent and co-constructed
dimension of communication. This dimension is captured in anthropologist Dell
Hymes’s famous SPEAKING mnemonic by the letter K, which stands for key.
According to Hymes (1972), key is the “tone or manner in which something is
said or written” (p. 62). For us, humor is (just one) key. An utterance or text that
is keyed as humorous is typically intended to elicit a feeling of mirth in its hearers
or readers (Chafe, 2007).
What Is Language Play?
Language play, as we use it in this text, refers to any manipulation of language
that is done in a non-serious manner for either public or private enjoyment. The
playful modifications that speakers make may take place at any level of language:
phonology (sound), morphosyntax (grammar), semantics (meaning), or pragmatics
(what is meant by what is said). Here, it is important to keep in mind that lan-
guage play need not be restricted to one level or even one language. Very often,
it cuts across linguistic boundaries in ways that are both clever and unexpected.
For example, multiple forms of humor and language play figure into this gem
invented by two teenage Anglophones learning Spanish as an additional language
at school and illustrated in this scene:
Setting: High school Spanish class. Student 1 and Student 2 (both male)
are best friends. Student 2 has just given several c orrect answers
in response to the teacher’s questions.
STUDENT 1: Stop being such a perhaps
STUDENT 2: Huh?
STUDENT 1: (laughing) You know, a quizás [kis as].
STUDENT 2: Ja, ja, ja [d3a, d3a, d3a] very funny.1
In this interaction, appreciation of the wordplay lies in recognizing that the Span-
ish word for perhaps (quizás) bears some phonetic semblance to the English phrase
“kiss ass” when rendered in hyper-Anglicized Spanish. Thus, a novel insult is born
