Catherine Evans Davies

How English-learners joke with native speakers: an interactional sociolinguistic perspective on humor as collaborative discourse across cultures

Abstract An approach to humor grounded in interactional sociolinguistics starts not with reified abstractions such as ‘humor’, ‘wit’, or ‘irony’ but rather with the situated interpretation of joking as a speech activity. Using videotaped data of crosscultural conversation groups, and employing a close linguistic analysis based in Gumperzs theory of conversational inference, this paper documents the ability of beginning language learners to collaborate in the construction of conversational joking discourse with native English speakers. The claim is made that communication is achieved indirectly within these jointly-constructed joking episodes through displaying understanding by playing within the frame set out by the other. Such fine-tuning of understanding is the core of why the ability to participate in such joking is important in the development of rapport. Illustrative joking episodes represent differences along several dimensions: the exploitation of limited sociolinguistic resources, with examples of primary reliance on the nonverbal and lexical, on the prosodic, and on the pragmatic; the interactional roles of the native English speaker and learner(s), with examples of different patterns of initiation and collaboration; and the focus of the joking within the general theme of the learners’ perspective on the language learning experience, in effect, the culture of the language learner, with examples highlighting the apparently arbitrary nature of idiomatic expressions, the difficulty of coping with interaction in the new language, and the general powerlessness of the language learner in a world of native speakers.

A Naturalistic Inquiry Into the Cultures of Two Divergent MA-TESOL Programs: Implications for TESOL

This article reports on a naturalistic inquiry into the cultures of two MA-TESOL programs in different parts of the United States, highlighting how their identities have been shaped by factors in their respective local environments that in turn affect what is taught in each program. The study explored how and why the two programs stress certain language teaching skills. The findings detail the divergent realities of the two programs with a view to raising consciousness and debate about the implications of such differences for the field of TESOL. T o what extent is an MA-TESOL program governed by local exigencies, constraints, and conditions that influence its general direction? This question guides the present study, in which we offer an account of a naturalistic inquiry into the cultures of two MA-TESOL programs in different parts of the United States. We highlight how their identities are contingent upon factors in their local environments that in turn shape the curriculum of each program. The study sheds light on at least two key issues: (a) how and why particular MA-TESOL programs stress the language teaching skills they do and (b) what the implications and consequences are for the TESOL field of having teachers graduate from divergent MA-TESOL programs. Our stance toward the programs is not intended to be judgmental; instead, our aim is to present the differences between these two programs by focusing on their institutional contexts, thereby raising consciousness about the implications of these differences for TESOL.

Joking as boundary negotiation among “good old boys”: “White trash” as a social category at the bottom of the Southern working class in Alabama

Abstract The point of this article is to show how the “You might be a redneck” joke cycle is appropriated to designate a lower social category within the Southern working class in Alabama, and to negotiate the boundaries between the good old boy working class “red neck” and the lower category of “white trash.” Close attention to language is important in the analysis because the jokers exaggerate features of the vernacular dialect to perform members of the lower social category. Within the tradition of the study of conversational joking (Fry, Sweet madness: A study of humor, Pacific Books, 1963; Tannen, Conversational style: Analyzing talk among friends, Oxford University Press, 1984; Davies, C. E., Joint joking: Improvisational humorous episodes in conversation: 360–371, 1984, Language and American ‘good taste’: Martha Stewart as mass-media role model, Routledge, 2003a, Journal of Pragmatics 35: 361–1385, 2003b; Norrick, Conversational joking: Humor in everyday talk, Indiana University Press, 1993; Kotthoff, Coherent keying in conversational humour: Contextualizing joint fictionalisation, John Benjamins, 1999), combined with the discourse analyis of radio talk (Coupland, Language, situation, and the relational self: Theorizing dialect-style in sociolinguistics, Cambridge University Press, 2002; Goffman, Forms of talk, The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), and “performance speech” (Schilling-Estes, Language in Society 27: 53–83, 1998), this study examines joking interaction on a popular morning radio talk show in Alabama that is hosted by two men, known to their audience as Jack and Bubba. The data are a set of CD recordings identified as “The Best of . . .” supplemented with additional regular shows. Examining the joking as an important part of a linguistic “presentation of self” (Goffman, The presentation of self in everyday life, Doubleday, 1959; Davies, C. E., Texas Linguistic Forum 44: 73–89, 2002), the analysis reveals how the joking between the two hosts and with members of the studio audience is rooted in sociolinguistic and cultural dimensions of the working class American South.

Humor in intercultural interaction as both content and process in the classroom

Abstract This article uses interactional sociolinguistic methodology to examine humor as both content and process in the classroom. It contributes to our increasing understanding not only of the ways that humor is perceived and constructed in intercultural discourse, but also the ways that it may have pedagogical benefits of increasing L2 pragmatic and interactional competence. The topic of humor in the classroom is typically treated either in relation to the teacher’s behavior, or in relation to course content. The former focuses on strategies for the use of humor in the service of effective classroom control and relationships with students (e.g., Loomans 1993; Shade 1996), with the assumption that more effective learning can take place in the atmosphere created. The latter focuses on the use of humor genres as the basis for language exercises (Megdyes 2002), but with little analysis of the nature of the humor. Within the field of second language learning and teaching, there has been a recent interest in humor as subsumed under the general rubric of language play (Cook 2000; Bushnell 2008; Evaldsson and Cekaite 2010; Jaspers 2011; Waring 2013), with a focus on the cognitive and the pedagogical possibilities at all levels of language (phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic). In addition, there is a growing body of literature that focuses on student-initiated joking in L2 classrooms, some of which explicitly uses humor as the construct (Garland 2010; Pomerantz and Bell 2011; Matsumoto 2014; Moalla 2014), as well as literature that is concerned with the ways in which joking interaction intersects with learning processes (Tocalli-Beller and Swain 2007; Waring 2011; Bell 2012; Kim 2014). A key idea that has emerged is the importance of student agency. This article uses an example of joking that was brought to the classroom by a student as part of an ethnographic pedagogy, and it analyses students’ use of joking within a discussion of the critical incident facilitated by the teacher. It is a multi-layered analysis of the use of a critical incident involving cross-cultural joking as part of course content, presenting a discourse analysis of a key class discussion in an adult class on cross-cultural interaction in which student joking interaction coincided with an insight point.

Interview with Robin Tolmach Lakoff

CED: I believe that you began as a classics major at Radcliffe. How did you become interested in linguistics, and how did your classics background inform your perspective, if at all? RTL: Well, this was the early 1960s, and Transformational Generative Grammar was getting started at MIT down the block. I was then dating someone who was a humanities major at MIT, and he was sitting in on Chomsky’s classes and I started hanging out there as well. The scene was electric: not only were the ideas revolutionary, but the MIT Linguistics Department was a very cohesive, indeed cultish, group, and it was very exciting to be there—more exciting, I daresay, than to be in the Harvard Classics or Linguistics Departments. I still find Latin a good foil, vs. English. Of course as Indo-European cousins they are very much alike (relative to, say, Hopi or Mandarin), but Latin is therefore familiar enough for me to feel that my intuitions about it are semi-reliable— yet different enough to provide another analytic perspective. (Besides, the Romans were such oafs. And two thousand year old gossip is always the best.) CED: What did it mean to hang out at the MIT Linguistics Department? Was it mostly sitting in on classes or were there particular places and times when people gathered to talk linguistics? Are there any moments from classes that you remember in particular? RTL: The MIT Linguistics Dept. in the ’60s was a culture and (as I said) a cult: we felt very much us-against-the-world, and at the same time we knew we were doing something very new and important; and we revered Chomsky— who for me at least was a kind of distant presence that I encountered in person only very rarely. It was, as academia was then, a very male place, and the kinds of things that got said and done to and about the few women in the