CATEGORY-ACTIVITY PUZZLES AS RESOURCES FOR HUMOUR IN L2 CLASSROOMS

15th METU International ELT Convention, Ankara, Türkiye, 10 - 11 Mayıs 2024, ss.36

L2 learners are not just L2 learners; countless other relevant social categorisation might be rightly

applied to them, and any of these might come to bear on their interactional conduct when learning, or

using, an L2 (Firth and Wagner, 1997). The relationship between humour and identity construction

has been widely investigated in the earlier literature (e.g., Schnurr, 2009; Waring, 2013); however,

only a handful of studies (Bonacina-Pugh, 2013; Moutinho, 2019; Nao, 2015) have examined

membership categories (‘teacher’ and ‘student’) in the classrooms. This study presents the first

examination of participants’ categorial orientations in talk-in-interaction that is produced and/or

treated as humorous in the second language (L2) classrooms. More specifically, drawing on

Membership Categorisation Analysis (MCA) and sequential analysis, this study explores how

participants invoke, negotiate, and deal with category-activity puzzles, - the unexpected combinations

of certain membership categories (Silverman, 2001) and category-bound activities-, as resources for

producing and/or treating utterances as humorous in L2 classrooms. The analysis demonstrates that

participants display complex and creative use of L2 to create incongruities for humorous effect in

producing category-activity puzzles. It is also observed that participants use their understandings of

common-sense knowledge and category memberships as a resource in managing and negotiating

incongruities created through category-puzzles during classroom tasks. As such, this study advances

our understanding with regards to the categorial orientations in humour practices in L2 classrooms

and contributes to the growing body of MCA studies in classrooms.

Keywords: Category-activity puzzles, MCA, humour, L2 classroom interaction