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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22, No. 0, pp.1159-1174
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2022
Received 04 May 2022 Revised 15 Oct 2022 Accepted 30 Oct 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.22..202210.1159

Visualizing Humorous Teaching with the Joking-Action Sequences: A Case Study of a Chinese Elementary EFL Class

Wanting Wang
PhD student, Department of English Language and Literature, Korea University, Tel: +86 18745877708 miko521998@gmail.com


© 2022 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This is a case study recording a Chinese elementary school's English lesson. The recorded class included 40 students around the age of 9, and was taught by an English-native speaker. Utilizing conversation analysis as a method, this study proposed two issues: one is to identify a new unit of turn-taking sequence — the joking-action, and try to characterize it; the other is to utilize the joking-action to visualize humor teaching and explore the practical applications and meanings of the joking-action. According to the analysis of the recorded video, joking-action in this study is roughly characterized by any verbal and non-verbal behavior that can cause students to laugh, thereby promoting these EFL learners’ comprehension and application of English. The limited data also showed that joking-actions were used flexibly and extensively by the English-native teacher, and had a noticeable effect on students’ understanding of a foreign language. This study identified a new turn-taking sequence unit that enriched and visualized humor instruction, with important theoretical and practical implications for the field of classroom conversation analysis and L2 teaching. However, this is only a case study and is not sufficient to generalize the concept and characteristics of joking-action. A large amount of quantitative or qualitative research is needed to refine this hypothesis.

Keywords:

classroom conversation analysis, turn-taking unit, joking-action, EFL class, humorous L2 teaching

Acknowledgments

I am very thankful to my friend Xiaoying Wang. She assisted me in recording the video for this research and provided me with a wealth of useful information regarding current elementary EFL education in China, deserves special mention.

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