Humor as Safe House in the Foreign Language Classroom

Abstract

Analyses of second language (L2) classroom interaction often categorize joking and other humorous talk by students as disruptive, off‐task behavior, thereby rendering it important only from a classroom management perspective. Studies of language play, however, have illustrated that such jocular talk not only allows students to construct a broader and perhaps more desirable range of classroom identities, but also occasions more complex and creative acts of language use than those normally found in L2 instructional settings. Likewise, critical sociolinguists have observed that the use of humor may constitute opposition and/or resistance to monotonous, culturally insensitive, or even face‐threatening classroom practices. This article presents a case for a particular communicative mode—humor—to be seen as a pedagogical safe house (Canagarajah, 1999, 2004; Pratt, 1991), extending this notion beyond spatial and temporal domains. Specifically, it draws on the notions of performance, calibration (Bauman, 2004; Rampton, 2006), and layered simultaneity (Blommaert, 2005; Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008) to understand how particular instances of classroom humor function in this fashion. It then considers how an understanding of humor as a safe house can inform recent theoretical discussions of communicative competence and L2 classroom interaction.