Nancy Bell – författare

This book is a practical and insightful guide for new MA TESOL students, providing information that will shape their expectations of the field and of their program. It discusses foundational information about the profession, as well as discussion and guidance regarding the graduate school experience.

This book is a practical and insightful guide for new MA TESOL students, providing information that will shape their expectations of the field and of their program. It discusses foundational information about the profession, as well as discussion and guidance regarding the graduate school experience.

Humor in the Classroom provides practical, research-based answers to questions that educational researchers and language teachers might have about the social and cognitive benefits that humor and language play afford in classroom discourse and additional language learning. The book considers the ways in which humor, language play, and creativity can construct new possibilities for classroom identity, critique prevailing norms, and reconfigure particular relations of power. Humor in the Classroom encourages educational researchers and language teachers to take a fresh look at the workings of humor in today’s linguistically diverse classrooms and makes the argument for its role in building a stronger foundation for studies of classroom discourse, theories of additional language development, and approaches to language pedagogy.

Humor in the Classroom provides practical, research-based answers to questions that educational researchers and language teachers might have about the social and cognitive benefits that humor and language play afford in classroom discourse and additional language learning. The book considers the ways in which humor, language play, and creativity can construct new possibilities for classroom identity, critique prevailing norms, and reconfigure particular relations of power. Humor in the Classroom encourages educational researchers and language teachers to take a fresh look at the workings of humor in today’s linguistically diverse classrooms and makes the argument for its role in building a stronger foundation for studies of classroom discourse, theories of additional language development, and approaches to language pedagogy.

Placing failed humor within the broader category of miscommunication and drawing on a range of conversational data, this text represents the first comprehensive study of failed humor. It provides a framework for classifying the types of failure that can occur, examines the strategies used by both speakers and hearers to avoid and manage failure, and highlights the crucial role humor plays in social identity and relationship management.

Interest in language play and linguistic creativity has increased in recent years, and the topic has been taken up from a variety of perspectives. In this book, disparate approaches to the topic are brought together, demonstrating that a number of phenomena whose similarities might not have been immediately recognized, have an academic home under the umbrella of language play and linguistic creativity. The contributions to this collection illustrate the variety of questions that can be asked regarding the social, cognitive, emotional, political, and cultural mechanisms and significance of innovative linguistic practices and point to new directions of inquiry. Furthermore, the work exemplifies a variety of ways in which this research can be carried out, as well as the range of contexts in which it might be investigated, including second language classrooms, online settings, and workplaces. Taken together, the chapters serve to illustrate the range of work that we will be accepting in the Language Play and Creativity series; viewed individually, each makes a unique contribution to some aspect of our understanding of creative language use.