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Humor and interlanguage in a bilingual elementary school setting
Abstract
For excerpts of the article, see
https://books.google.de/books?hl=de&lr=&id=vf3mnJeg8G8C&oi=fnd&pg=PA187&dq=immersion+bilingual+transition+kersten&ots=ZngTjnSt8b&sig=PlXWH5i_ZghqHarkzRjt0hRnpJg#v=onepage&q&f=false
... (Glenn und Holt 2013, S. 2) Ein Witz, eine Erzählung oder ein Kommentar können allen "Regeln der Komik" entsprechen und dennoch von den RezipientInnen nicht lachend aufgenommen werden. 1 Ebenso kann etwas, das nicht als komisch "intendiert" oder markiert war, von anderen als Lachgegenstand behandelt werden (vgl. Kersten 2009). ...
... ). Ebenso wird Lachen zur Verarbeitung von peinlichen Momenten oder problematischen Äußerungen (vgl.Clift 2013, Kersten 2009, Haakana 2001) oder als Mittel der nachträglichen Abschwächung von Konflikten im Gespräch eingesetzt (vgl. Warner-Garcia 2014).Eine genaue Grenzziehung zwischen Komik und Ernst erweist sich allgemein als schwierig; die genannten Studien zeigen jedoch eindrücklich, dass Lachen in einem engen Zusammenhang mit Positionierungsaktivitäten steht. ...
Beim Forschungsinstrument des narrativ-sprachbiographischen Interviews werden die Interviewten in einem einleitenden Impuls aufgefordert, ihre „Lebensgeschichte“ mit einem thematischen Fokus auf sprachbezogene Erlebnisse erzählend zu rekonstruieren und zu reflektieren. Im Verlauf von so gewonnenen sprachbiographischen Erzählungen fällt auf, dass die interviewten Personen ihre Erzählungen häufig metakommunikativ als amüsante Episoden rahmen oder durch lachendes Sprechen als humorvoll-komisch modalisieren. Die rekonstruktive Auseinandersetzung mit Migration und Mehrsprachigkeit wird von den Interviewten in solchen Sequenzen also eng mit den Aspekten Komik, Humor und Unernst verbunden.
... New developments in the CA-inspired SLA research that have emerged and proliferated in the past decade or so (e.g., Mori & Markee, 2009) have opened up an exciting arena for the detailed analysis of interactions that involve laughter (but not necessarily humor per se; see, e.g., Bushnell, 2008;Sert & Jacknick, 2015;Waring, 2013). These studies often reported on the instances of laughter produced in the face of interactional troubles or linguistic inadequacy (Kersten, 2009;Ohta, 2008;Petitjean & González-Martínez, 2015;Sert & Jacknick, 2015). Laughter in troubled situations was found to play various roles, such as indicating the presence of troubles, mitigating the seriousness of troubles, and even preempting and solving the troubles. ...
... or feelings of language anxiety, as well as engaging in the representation of multicompetent L2 personas (e. g. Bell 2007;Belz 2002;Broner and Tarone 2001;Kersten 2009;Pomerantz and Bell 2007;Schmitz 2002). Evidence of these benefits lies in the close connection between the use of verbal humor in L2 and the learners' expertise of the language. ...
This article explores the interface between language play and language awareness. Grounded in an understanding of two kinds of language play, ludic language play and language play as rehearsal, it shows how the shared theoretical underpinnings and distinctive features of both overlap with the concept of language awareness. Spanning across cognitive, affective, and social dimensions of learners’ language awareness, both types of language play highlight learners’ conscious perception and sensitivity to linguistic forms and functions, attention, noticing, alertness, and particularly engagement. The paper contends that there is a close connection between language play and language awareness, and thereby argues that language play episodes, whether for the purpose of amusement or private rehearsal, could yield insights into students’ knowledge about language and their ability to reflect on it through engagement with language. Finally, the paper outlines implications for research on language play episodes and for their use in teaching to incorporate humor into the language classroom.
... At the time this study was conducted, the project comprised two bilingual preschools, the French-German Rappelkiste in Rostock (implemented in 1995), and the English-German AWO-Kindergarten in Altenholz, a suburb of Kiel (1996), one recently implemented bilingual branch at the Claus-Rixen elementary school in Altenholz (1999), and several secondary schools. In these institutions, Henning Wode and his research team conduct studies on the acquisition of phonology (Wode 2003, Kersten 2002, Kersten 2008, Piske et al. 2002, the lexicon (Wode 1999, Daniel 1999, Rohde 2005, Rohde & Tiefenthal 2002, Tiefenthal 2009, morpho-syntax (Burmeister & Steinlen 2008, Kersten 2009a and narrative structures (Möller 2006(Möller , 2008 as well as on the development of literacy ) and on immersion teaching principles (Burmeister 2006a,b,c, Burmeister & Pasternak 2004, Kersten et al. 2009, best practices, factors relevant to the implementation of immersion programs (Kersten in press, see also Kersten et al. in press) and on humor and interlanguage (Kersten 2009b). Research methods range from quantitative to qualitative approaches including standardized tests, various longitudinal and cross-sectional language assessment measures and participant observation by student research assistants or junior researchers who regularly spend time in the institutions and who, under the supervision of the senior researchers, carry out the field work. ...
Variation in verbal morphology is a phenomenon which has been the object of linguistic research for a long time. Two competing sets of predictions have been put forth to account for the distribution of verbal inflections in learner language: The Aspect Hypothesis posits that learners predominantly use inflections to indicate categories of lexical aspect, while the Discourse Hypothesis claims that they are used to differentiate foreground from background in narratives. Drawing on a corpus of more than sixty L2 narrations elicited in a German-English immersion elementary school, this longitudinal study analyzes the interaction of lexical aspect and discourse grounding. The results confirm both predictions and show more clearly than previous research in what way both effects can interact with each other.
... Ebenso wird Lachen zur Verarbeitung von peinlichen Momenten oder problematischen Äußerungen (vgl. Clift 2013, Kersten 2009, Haakana 2001) ...
Humour has been deemed a special language competency, or more extremely, humour has been seen as a form of mastery over a given language, as well as the culture, norms, and themes associated with the people speaking this language. This chapter provides an overview of fundamental issues concerning humour and a review of the state of the art literature from an interdisciplinary perspective. It focuses on issues of the humour and language, as well as the translation of humour from one language to another. The chapter elaborates on the processing of humour in the brain, presents a review on the currently existing studies, and briefly elaborates on humour and language learning. It differentiates between humour processing as a cognitive task, amusement as the emotional response to humour, and the motor/behavioural reactions (smiling or laughter). The chapter presents a conclusion on the reviewed studies and offers hypotheses on humour and the multilingual brain.
This paper explores the under-researched topic of failed humour in the context of public-facing media interactions. While most previous pragmatics research has focused on the support strategies employed by conversational partners when classifying humour attempts as successful or failed, this paper acknowledges that in public facing media interactions, the participation framework is more complex, raising interesting questions about how and to what extent humour can be seen to succeed or fail.
Employing a socio-pragmatic approach, we aim to highlight the complexity of humour in public-facing interactions, by drawing on media interviews with professional athletes and coaches. Our analysis illustrates how humour attempts can simultaneously succeed and fail with different members of the broader participation framework. However, our particular focus is the implications of failed humour in this context on identity construction. Considering that an attempt at humour is also an attempt to make certain identity claims, any humour that fails has potentially detrimental effects on identity construction. This is perhaps more problematic in public-facing media interactions, where failed humour is particularly face-threatening and may challenge the public image of those who attempted the humour.
In this study, we analyze conversations recorded during ethnographic research in the bilingual in Greek and Turkish Muslim community of Rhodes, Greece. We examine aspects of the overall and sequential organization of talk as well as instances of humor produced by the code alternation choices that speakers of different ethnic origin, generation and social groups make during interaction. Being essentially a conversational practice, code-switching is primarily ana-lyzed in the conversational context in which it appears as a meaningful choice of bilingual speakers. In this context, humorous code-switchings are seen as pertaining to a continuum of a) discourse related alternations connected to pragmatic parameters of the organization of talk-in-interaction, and b) partici-pant related alternations strategically used for the construction of aspects of the bilingual identity as well as dynamic alignments among participants.
This paper explores the use of bilingual punning in multilingual multiparty conversations among speakers with asymmetric language skills. The data of the study is drawn from video-recorded mundane peer conversations among Finns and Estonians. In this data, participants often use their respective mother tongues while talking to each other, even though only some of them have an active command of both cognate languages. The analysis of the data revealed that bilingual punning is used in these conversations among other things for dealing with the speakers' asymmetric language skills and asymmetric access to the ongoing talk. Punning typically occurs in sequences, in which participants teach each other words and in which problems of understanding are expressed. Puns can be used for both indicating and treating problems in understanding, and they are used for sharing linguistic knowledge. Puns can also help close prolonged and problematic sequences in an affiliative way. Punning provides the participants with a means of sharing positive affects even in interactionally problematic situations. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. All rights reserved.
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