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Humor In The Foreign Language Classroom, Emily M. Walker

Channels: Where Disciplines Meet

Humor is a notoriously vague construct, often identified not by formal definition but by individual intuition (Bell, 2009). This makes it rather difficult to study or categorize concisely – indeed, analyzing humor or explaining a joke is often thought to remove the fundamental enjoyment from the experience. Despite the inherent hazards, this research seeks to provide further insight into the effects and potential applications of humor in the foreign language (FL) classroom, guided by the following research question: How does L1 humor, specifically when used as a pedagogical tool, influence students’ affective filters in a college-level elementary foreign language classroom? …