Humor in the Language Classroom

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The production and understanding of humor are supposed to commonly occur in an educational environment. Nevertheless, such a kind of spontaneous, unpredictable, situational humor is quite elusive and hard to outline in scientifically spendible terms. In the perspective of the present study, instances of humor are part of the interactional practices between the teacher and learners in a language classroom.. Observations and conclusions are empirically grounded on the analysis of authentic samples collected in my four-year activity with different groups of Hungarian foreign learners of Italian. Humor is viewed as a tool which offers a privileged viewpoint on a multiplicity of aspects, namely discursive, psychological and didactic The goal is to instantiate and achieve an attemptive description of the emergence of verbal humor in the routine teaching practice. My research aims to make a first affirmative step - and to some extent pave the way - towards more thorough and systematic interdisciplinary insights on humor in the language classroom, as an area of research identifiable for its specific traits and the multi-oriented function and role of humor.