The multimodal work of creating a humorous frame in English as a foreign language classes

Abstract

Classroom talk is full of humour, language play, and other acts of creative language use (Bell and Pomerantz, 2016). Much work on humour in language classrooms has widely focused on the roles, social functions, and markers of humour in interaction (e.g. Shively, 2013; Wagner and Urios-Aparisi, 2011; Bell, 2009b; Chabeli, 2008; Schmitz, 2002; Senior, 2001). However, there has been less research on how participants mobilise multimodal resources to engender a humorous frame in L2 classroom interaction (Reddington and Waring, 2015; Lehtimaja, 2011). This study aims to shed light on (a) how students produce utterances as humorous in Initiation- Response-Feedback (IRF) (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975) sequences, (b) how jocular frames are sequentially produced in the stretches of turns-at-talk, and (c) how teachers respond to student utterances produced and/or treated as humorous in task-based settings in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms in Turkey. The current study adopts the ethnomethodological approach of Conversation analysis (CA) in order to address these different aspects of turns-at-talk produced and/or treated as humorous in L2 classrooms drawing on 29 hours of video and audio recordings, which were collected from four different classrooms at a university in Turkey. The analysis provides a systematic examination of how students’ utterances are designed as humorous through deploying multimodal resources at different sequential positions in IRF sequences. As such, it demonstrates significant observations that provide valuable implications for L2 classroom interaction research, and also humour scholarship. Additionally, through exploring sequential environments where and how participants delineate between jocular and non-jocular frames, it shows the delicate work put in by both teachers and students in mitigating students’ responses that do not align with participants’ normative expectations about participation framework and cultural shared expectations. Furthermore, it shows how teachers employ multimodal resources in responding to students’ utterances produced and/or treated as humorous in a way to encourage participation, typically through self-selection, and accomplish pedagogical goals by creating a context conducive to teaching/learning opportunities. Thus, this study extends our understanding of L2 classroom interaction and builds on the existing literature, which has widely concentrated on teachers’ use of ‘humour’ in the classroom in teaching materials or as a teaching strategy (e.g. Bell and Pomerantz, 2016; Wagner and Urios-Aparisi, 2011; Bell, 2009b; Chabeli, 2008; Schmitz, 2002; Senior, 2001). It provides implications for teacher training and foreign language teaching in a way to encourage participation and create language teaching/learning opportunities through attending to these episodes in classroom interaction.