Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
The interplay between humour and culture in the displays of categorial work in L2 classroom interaction, Bolu, Türkiye, 1 - 03 Ekim 2025, ss.61, (Özet Bildiri)
Social categories, which people use in their descriptions of people in society (e.g., teacher, mother, sister, etc.), are inference rich and do implicative work storing a great deal of knowledge that members of a society have about the society (Sacks, 1992). In other words, categorisation reveals culture (Sacks, 1986). Drawing on Sacks’s notion and exemplar cases from the dataset, this study explores how categorial work displaying participants’ common-sense and stereotypical understandings of culture and society occur in Second Language (L2) classroom interaction produced and/or treated as humorous. Using Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA), 29-hour video recordings from EFL classrooms at a state university in Türkiye have been analysed. The analysis will illustrate how culture and stereotypes are displayed in the inference-rich details of categorial work occasioned in the practices of humour produced during L2 classroom interaction. As such, it will present significant insights regarding participants’ cultural and stereotypical understandings outside the classroom and document how they are brought into the classroom context as a means of producing humour during the routine classroom activities. More specifically, it will present how participants redirect the classroom interaction to negotiate and manage potentially delicate categorization work displayed as common-sense understandings and make categorial work as relevant and consequential in the stretches of talk in the course of teaching/learning practices. Therefore, this study will shed light on an (under)researched phenomenon of participants’ categorial orientations in doing humour in L2 classrooms and contribute to the growing body of MCA studies in classrooms offering unique implications for foreign language teaching and teacher education.