View Content #25521

By Lindsay Marean, CASLS InterCom Editor

Last week I met up with members of my family and traveled to the annual Potawatomi Gathering, where I spent nearly a week socializing and sharing with other Potawatomi people from across North America. On my flight there with my 18-month-old niece, her father explained to me that one of her favorite games these days is the “babbling game,” where she says nonsense syllables that sound like an English phrase, and he is supposed to repeat them back to her. What a delightful way for her to develop English language awareness, I thought.

Later, at the Potawatomi Gathering, she heard a Potawatomi leave-taking: Pama mine. “Ba ba bi be,” she said. “Ma ba mi be!” And so on. Oh, no! I thought. She’s learning Potawatomi all wrong! What if someone overhears and thinks I’m teaching her wrong? Paralyzed, I failed to play the “babbling game” with her or even to validate her creative wordplay in our ancestral language.

Clearly, I had an unexamined double standard. As Brutt-Griffler notes in her discussion of World Englishes and language change, a double standard between L1 and L2 is common in the study of language: “Modern linguistics works from the assumption that change initiated by a ‘native’ (or mother tongue) speaker is not error. Theories of SLA, on the other hand, begin from the opposite premise, change introduced into the language by L2 learners constitutes error” (Brutt-Griffler, 2002: 129). Although Brutt-Griffler is talking about language change, the same attitudes are common with language play. As Pomerantz and Bell discuss in their study of language play in an advanced Spanish conversation class, "Whereas native speakers are often lauded for their creation of witty neologisms, puns, and rhymes, non-native speakers are rarely granted such licence. L2 users playing with language regularly run the risk of being corrected or chastised for what is seen as their failure to conform to target language (TL) norms” (Pomerantz & Bell, 2007: 558). As advocates for multilingualism and intercultural awareness, we need to recognize and address this double standard.

The reality is that intercultural humor requires attention to a wide array of language skills. Something is funny because it deviates from the normal script, whether that be with an unexpected pronunciation, double meaning, or social or pragmatic mismatch. To use humor, a language learner must have an awareness of the norm and intentionally violate it (cf. Shively, 2013: 931-932). The effort involved is worth it, however. We use humor not only to be funny, but also to build social bonds and to influence others. Word play also builds more awareness of the forms of words and structures, and socio-pragmatic play can make implicit target culture practices explicit to learners.

Unfortunately, second language learners face several challenges when joking across languages and cultures. Often, proficient speakers fail to consider novices capable of making a joke. Expert speakers typically have more social power, and they fail to ratify novices’ knowledge, positioning them in a more restricted conversational role (cf. Ochs & Schieffelin, 2011) and dooming them to an “outgroup” status.

Another challenge comes from typical approaches to formal language instruction. Pomerantz and Bell offer a friendly critique of communicative language teaching, which tends to emphasize the utilitarian accomplishment of common communicative tasks while “relegating play to the margins of acceptable classroom practice” (Pomerantz and Bell, 2007: 557). Students themselves considered “sanctioned play” in the classroom to be fun, but not pedagogically valuable, even though Pomerantz and Bell found that the language students used during play was qualitatively different (for example, less cursory and formulaic) from that used during “serious” classroom time. Communicative language teaching does not preclude humor and language play; it is up to us as language professionals to consciously integrate it into learners’ experiences.

What can we as language teachers and facilitators do? To begin with, we can change our own attitudes in several ways. We can accept wordplay and other forms of humor as an important part of the process of developing language and intercultural skills. We can position learners as equal conversational partners capable of making jokes and playing with language. We can include sanctioned play (role plays, games, etc.) and unsanctioned play (creative use of language during other activities) as a regular part of our daily classroom activities. Finally, we can explicitly make language play a part of our curricula and therefore students’ language learning experiences.

Next time I hear my niece engaging in spontaneous wordplay in Potawatomi, I hope to respond to and participate enthusiastically in her creative interaction with our vibrant, living language.

References

Brutt-Griffler, J. (2002). World English: A Study of its Development. Bristol, United Kingdom: Channel View Publications.

Ochs, E. & Schieffelin, B. (2011). The theory of language socialization. In A. Duranti, Ed., The Handbook of Language Socialization. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Pomerantz, A. & Bell, N. (2007). Learning to play, playing to learn: FL learners as multicompetent language users. Applied Linguistics 28:4, 556-578.

Shively, R. (2013). Learning to be funny in Spanish during study abroad: L2 humor development. Modern Language Journal 97:4, 930-946.