Dealing with jokes in the ESL class: a pedagogical proposal centred on comprehension
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15448/1984-4301.2019.4.36113Keywords:
Joke Types, Humour, Instructional Pragmatics, Pedagogical Proposal, Metapragmatic Awareness.Abstract
This paper makes a pedagogical proposal to delve into jokes in the ESL classroom and sensitise learners to their complexity. It consists of five instructional phases and is based, on the one hand, on another proposal to teach the pragmatics of speech acts in an L2. On the other hand, this proposal relies on a relevance-theoretic classification of jokes made on the basis of the various linguistic, cultural and cognitive factors that humorists exploit in their production. Since it only centres on how different types of jokes can be distinguished and what their correct comprehension involves, it has a cognitive orientation and does not address issues connected with joke production. The proposal is devised for ESL students with an advanced level of English and ultimately seeks to develop their metalinguistic, meta-cultural and metacognitive abilities as a way of enabling them to grasp the humorousness of funny texts, appraise them and react to them in an appropriate way.
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