Language Centres at a Crossroads

The use of humor in a foreign-language classroom is often encouraged, but few instructors are willing to include it in their EAP and ESP courses. They fear that humor would be viewed as un-academic and distract students from the main goal of mastering communication in a foreign language in academic and professional settings. Instructors who are not native speakers may be reluctant to transfer stereotypes of their own culture into communication in English. Humor is known to be a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it can promote in-group solidarity and ease the tension caused by fear of expressing oneself in a foreign language; on the other hand, it can be used as a means of expressing superiority, disparagement and even aggression. In order to avoid the latter risks, authors of EAP and ESP coursebooks avoid including jokes, word play and humorous cartoons in teaching materials, and instructors shun banter in their communication with the students.

The goal of this presentation is to analyze how humor works in the context where learners and instructors are non-native speakers and where students are unmotivated since English is not their major. Moreover, we are exploring humor in classes which are multilingual and multicultural, i.e., the students' perception of humor is perforce grounded in different cultural traditions. We look at humor in its manifestation in both the linguistic and social context of teaching EAP and ESP courses in Israeli academia and trace the ways in which humor is framed in class interaction. We discuss the function of humor initiated by the instructor as part of attaining teaching goals; we also look at "incidental" humor which spontaneously arises in class interaction, bringing it closer to real-life communication. More specifically, we discuss the use of humor in pedagogical terms with regard to its capacity to foster students' participation, as well as in sociolinguistic terms with regard to facework and the creation or subversion of social order in class. Relying on communicative-pragmatic analysis of course materials, participant observation and auto-ethnography, we discuss humor as part of the instructor's emotional management in the process of teacher-student / student-student interaction and examine it as an emotional constituent of communication in the classroom.

Использование юмора в курсах изучения иностранных языков - эффективное средство снижения стресса и повышения студенческой мотивации. Однако преподаватели часто избегают использовать юмор, считая, что это неуместно в академическом контексте и может способствовать укоренению отрицательных культурных гетеростереотипов. В докладе рассматриваются способы введения юмора в аудиторный дискурс в ситуации многоязычной и многокультурной студенческой аудитории, т.е., в ситуации, когда юмор воспринимается в контексте разных лингвокультур. Мы проанализируем функции юмора в тех случаях, когда он намеренно используется преподавателем как часть учебного материала и когда он спонтанно возникает в процессе коммуникации на занятиях.
Опираясь на коммуникативно-прагматический анализ, включенное наблюдение и автоэтнографию, мы обсудим, каким образом юмор способствует освоению языкового материала, приближает искусственно созданную аудиторную коммуникацию к естественной и влияет на эмоциональную атмосферу на занятиях.

Ключевые слова: английский для академических целей, юмор, мультикультурная коммуникация, эмоции, внутригрупповая солидарность, стереотипы.

Claudia Zbenovich is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Hadassah College, Jerusalem. Her research interests lie in the area of cross-cultural communicative pragmatics and study of emotion talk in an intercultural context. She is currently engaged in an international research project on therapeutic emotional language and culture funded by the Israeli Science Foundation.

Associate professor Maria Yelenevskaya heads the CALL Laboratory in the Humanities and Arts Department at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Her research and publications deal with multilingualism and multiculturalism, ethnography of CMC communication and the use of computer technologies in language pedagogies.