The Importance Of Humor In Intercultural Communication

889 Words4 Pages
Introduction A number of sociolinguistic as well as pedagogical theories emphasize the importance of humour in teaching and learning processes; however, research on the reasons for the effects of humour in intercultural academic contexts has enjoyed scant attention. In Humor in British academic lectures and Chinese students’ perceptions of it, Yu Wang tries to explore the amount of humour within British academic lectures and Chinese students’ perception of it. The lack of recent studies on the abovementioned topic as well as Britain being one of the more popular destinations for international students prompted the author of the article to conduct this study and as such it provides valuable insight into how often and how successfully do the…show more content…
Moreover, Wang claims that their studies derive data from conversations in academic context which is quite different from the communication in lectures where communication tends to be less interactive and asymmetric. He furthermore proceeds to explain what humour actually is and provides a number of studies which explored this phenomenon during the last thirty years. In the light of the results of the abovementioned studies he defines humour as a phenomenon which often plays paradoxical role in interaction as it is used to tease someone yet express affection or self-depreciate oneself in order to defuse tense situation which is according to Nesi (2012) rather useful. Similarly enough, he defines humor as being…show more content…
The author found 157 humorous episodes with frequent instances of lecturer teasing the students, joking about a third party or being self-depreciative. Additionally, the author points out that the BASE corpus was not primarily meant for the investigation of humour and therefore presented limited information on the non-verbal element of humour, something that is rather complex to define. Therefore he carried out further data collection and gathered much needed information about the participants, something which BASE corpus lacked as well. Furthermore, he wrote down on-site notes in order to record the non-verbal as well as prosodic features of the humour episodes. Finally, he identified 10 humour episodes which represented common types of humour in both BASE and his own data. The participants listened to the extracts and wrote down their accounts of the humorous episode. Afterwards, the author interviewed the participants about the same HE’s which they previously
Show More
Related

  • Japan Organizational Culture Case Study

    3205 Words  | 13 Pages

    management-training programme to train North American managers in intercultural management, I have identified Japan as a country in the Asia Pacific region. As more than 95% of its residents are Japanese, it can be said that Japan is a homogeneous country. Japan’s uniformity plays a part in making it unchallenging for its people to comprehend each other with hardly any conversation. In other words, they use less verbal communication. On the other hand, America is heterogeneous and thus their people

    Read More

  • Examples Of Discourse Analysis

    8964 Words  | 36 Pages

    They had to balance the movements of a particle under their control to the movements of a target particle, sitting in front of a computer screen. Just as in many authentic work situations, verbal communication alone is not enough here to effect the close co-adjustment to the screen and to the screen borne illustrations through which a beginning inconsistency in understanding becomes settled. As Roschelle and Clancey declare, the two students, Gerry and

    Read More

More about The Importance Of Humor In Intercultural Communication

Open Document