Rationale
Being able to make sense of humour in any jokes at any communicative events keeps one feeling joyful Reading or hearing a joke and laughing when comprehending and interpreting not only draws one out of the state of being stressful but also establishes or restores a positive emotional climate and a sense of connection among people, making them take pleasure in the company of others As Provine (2000) says that laughter is not primary about humour, but about social relationships and McGhee (2002) stresses the importance of humour using his own words in an interesting way that laughter is the shortest distance between two people Also, Moran et al (2014) found out people who have a good sense of humour are perceived to have more socially-desirable traits than those with less of a sense of humour Funny people may make a good impression on others by reducing the social distance during interactions perhaps conveying greater social warmth, individuals who have a sense of humour may also gain health benefits, with humour acting as an important mechanism for life's tribulations, decreasing stress and improving performance in the workplace
The benefits of humour in the workplace are that a happy work environment will make employees to be more loyal and productive For instance, tactful jokes may create healthy working environment increasing people‘s enjoymen of work The turnover may increase as employees feel content and loyal to the company And the cost associated with illness may decrease as people experience the positive physiological and psychological effects of laughter (Pham, 2014) This is true with some previous studies that people who have fun on the job are more creative, more productive, better decision-makers, and get along better with co-workers
Likewise, in the field of tourism, humour is necessary, especially in the job of tour guides where humour is essentially delivered and appreciated, the relationship is accordingly improved and there comes a nice trip Actually, one of the most common rhetorical devices for successful tour guides during their practice is to use humour (Meged, 2010) Tour guides can use jokes in communication with tourists and run a successful tour: Tourists laugh or feel amused and have a good trip as a result As Howard, Twitches and Smith (2001: 34) confirm, "humour was also used as a means to ―wake-up‖ people, to change the pace of the tour, to renew people's interest in their surroundings and to ensure an enjoyable experience" Woodside et al (2007) reminds that, during the travel phase, the tourists may experience informal humour when sharing a joke with their travelling companions, with the tourism employees or the local people they encounter because it is important to use humour to create a friendly and cooperative atmosphere among tour participants: tourists and tour guides The kind of humour for tourism is named informal humour which is "the spontaneous creation and sharing of jokes during the travel situations"
(Pearce & Pabel, 2015: 55) Tour guides open humorous conversations with tourists helping them to become directly involved in producing and co-creating their own humour based on social interactions (Anderson, 2007; Edersor, 2001), cope with a range of stressful, awkward or frustrating travel situations (Frew, 2006a) and more specifically, gain control of a situation by making it appear less threatening, difficult or embarrassing (Solomon, 1996)
In reality, there are many cases for the effectiveness of using humour in tour guiding practice Meged (2010) observed indigenous tour guides at work on tour guiding capacity in Australia and concluded thathumour enhanced group cohesion The guide had a very interactive style and direct, racy humour, which worked well with the tourist group on the day On a tourist website (2017), a foreign tourist expressed his pleasure in an eight-hour tour which was filled with laughter because the Vietnamese tour guide ambushed them with jokes in a stop in Ho Chi Minh City Likewise, in NhaTrang in an observation of a city tour in the preliminary study of this study, experienced tour guides told interesting jokes that made foreign tourists happy and their guided tours were very successful Travel agents in Khanh Hoa Travel Company agreed that it was necessary to use humour during the trips because humour-oriented trips made more profits than the ones without humour
However, Vietnamese tour guides (TG) could use little humour when communicating with foreign tourists (FT) who speak English during their trips In an interview of scanning the humour use with a TG who had six-year of tour guiding experience, it was found that humour-oriented tours were essential but Vietnamese TGs neglected them as they were not competent at telling jokes in English and had little knowledge about humour and that their most interest was tourists‘ safety during the trip That was because they did not have any lessons of making sense ofhumour or telling jokes in English at college or university The humour they made in their trip came from their own experience and creation and the jokes they told were collected from the internet by themselves Reality shows that college English language programs for tour guides have mostly focused on improving the quality of training with good curriculum, syllabus and materials of English and American cultures, tourism geography, cross culture and English language skills Moreover, most students at provincial colleges are not much competent at English or self-confident to communicate with foreign tourists in English since they do not have opportunity to contact with foreigners and they are quite timid
Actually, it is not usually easy for Vietnamese learners of English as their foreign language (EFL) to appreciate English humour let alone producing it because they are not to be absolutely competent at humour and humour mechanism (Raskin, 1985, Attardo, 1994; Ritchie, 2004) As being seen, when a native speaker reads or hears a joke in their language, he/she unconsciously and effortlessly makes the judgments
(Freud, 1905) about the appropriacy of the humour they use, which means they naturally mention the formation of the surprise element or the rule or the context of the joke but for the issue that they quickly or slowly understand it Foreign language (EFL) learners, on the contrary, must learn how to understand the joke in different social contexts in which the addressers are from different cultures Moreover, while discerning whether or not a remark is to be taken humorously, non-native speakers (NNS) find it much more difficult to recognize such a remark or sometimes they fail to notice (Banitz, 2005) Thus they have to achieve competence involving socio- culture (Hymes, 1972), knowledge of textual conventions (Haliday and Hassan,
1976), conventional rules (Van Dijk, 1977), and language usage (Widdowson, 1978)
Also, in order to understand the English speaking joke tellers, an EFL learner has to be equipped with such knowledge to interpret EFL humorous utterances That means he/she has to be taught about EFL humour and has lessons to practice it
Nevertheless, humour is not a rarity in the field of tourism for EFL learners in Viet Nam‘s education and policies There have been changes in the teaching methods of English and in the English syllabus and textbooks used in colleges and universities‘ curricula Firstly, the application of the Communicative Language Teaching approach and the learner-centered approach has opened a new perspective for teaching English, supplying learners with pleasure Secondly, this can be seen through the decisions of the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) that the communicative approach has been introduced to many English language classrooms and any syllabuses and curriculum at any schools, colleges and university where a large number of people are trained for the country‘s work force (MoET, 2010; Pham, 2014) Specifically, according to the Curriculum Guidelines for English Training in Tourism Vocational Training in Viet Nam (2009: 9) the English proficiency for Tour Guideis required from low standard at 625 to high standard at 700 points which is equivalent to the level between B1 and B2 of the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference, 2011) and says that at C1 learners ―can use language flexibly and effectively, including emotional, allusive and joking usage.‖ Moreover, professional regulations of English levels for international tour guides (MoCST, 2009) decide that tour guides are supposed to be able to tellfunny stories or quizzes for foreign tourists in the long journey Thus, this study has been carried out to meet such requirements and help tour guide students be well-prepared for their future job
One last but not least to pave the way for the present study is that two studies concluding humour can be taught and developed for EFL learners and humour is closely related with tourism Pham (2014) has a systematic investigation on the use of humour in the EFL classroom at universities in the context of Viet Nam His findings reveal that humour can be trained and integrated in language syllabi althrough there needs to be consideration on how to apply a scientific and systematic method In parallel, Fabel (2014) has comprehensive examinations of humour in the field of tourism in Australia Fabel (2014) explored the multifaceted construct of humour in a naturalistic way and among multiple tourism audience
Humour plays important role in creating enjoyable and engaging tourism experiences
Thus, for the above justifiable reasons, the present study has been carried out to help tour guide students have chance of access to humour and well-prepared for their future job.
Significance of the study
This study is significant in many aspects as it endeavours to make following contributions
(1) As a contribution to the EFL teaching and learning methodologies, this study discovers the extent to which authentic materials (AM) can help develop TG students‘ ability to make sense of humour in English jokes in the light of the theories of humour, pragmatic competence (PC) and humour competence (HC)
(2) The findings of this study contribute to the process of promoting a workforce of professional tour guides for Khanh Hoa province who not only have a good sense of L2 humour but also can use it in communication via English with foreign tourists visiting the province
(3) This study brings benefits to EFL students in improving their communicative competence by raising their awareness of the importance of understanding English jokes and providing them with strategies and methods to
(4) The results of the study are beneficial to English language instructors in introducing English jokes into their English language classroom, providing them with methods of integrating teaching humour in English jokes into other syllabi such as cross-culture, designing authenticity into the teaching materials and adapting authentic materials to suit their students‘ needs in making sense of English humor This is a new contribution of the present study as an evidence to confirm the fact that humour can be trained
(5) Personally, the study has enriched the researcher profoundly in terms of humour competence such that she has gradually developed into a more cheerful personality Her knowledge of humour theories has enabled her to perceive the humorous subtleties not only in the English language but also in the Vietnamese language, her mother tongue
This, in turns, grows her love of the two languages intensively.
Aims and objectives of the study
The overall goal of the study is to help improve Vietnamese student‘s ability to make sense of humor in English jokes through the use of authentic English materials The study elicits aims and objectives
(1) To develop the students‘ ability to make sense of humour in English jokes
(2) To explore the extent to which the students' ability to understand, interpret the humour and recite authentic English jokes for use in subsequent future jobs as international tour guides
(1) To attain the opinions of tour guides, tour guide students, teachers and tourists about needs of learning humour in English jokes via authentic materials
(2) To grasp criteria and strategies for selecting and using the authentic materials appropriate for the experimental course on making sense of humour in English jokes as an intervention
(3) To deal with the internal and external difficulties that tour guide students encounter in understanding and interpreting humour in English jokes in the suggested authentic materials
(4) To pursue methods/ strategies to help develop students' ability in making sense of humour in English jokes through authentic materials alongside the instructional aim of developing students‘ communicative competence
(5) To demonstrate the students' ability to make sense of humour before and after taking the intervention course as evidence of the intervention effectiveness.
Scope of the study
Based on such goal, aims and objectives, the study was conducted under the following scopes First, the target population comprised the students whose major was English for tourism and whose future professional jobs are tour guides, the tour guides and tourists, teacher of English for tourism in NhaTrang so that the results of the study may be applicable to the groups of subjects and disciplinesthatshare the same needs, interest and enthusiasm in humour Second, the research samples were limited to college undergraduates who were at the third year since they already reached similar level of English proficiency and were able to catch up with the level of linguistic competence for English humour comprehension Third, with the limitation of teaching time and resources, the proposed authentic materials only focused on verbal humour, an important element of the work of an international tour guide, to help students be ready for their real life job after graduation Finally, the focus of the study was on making sense of humour (i.e humour comprehension and interpretation) in English canned (ready-made) jokes, not on humour production or creation However, reciting of a canned joke, a low level of humour production, was included in the intervention because it is well understood that impromptu partially makes up the excellent tour guides.
Research context
Tourism has been developing for ages and thousands of foreign tourists from different countries are welcomed every year It is an important and thiving industry in Viet Nam and the workforce of tour guides is considered to be energetic and well-trained Punctually, universities and colleges in Khanh Hoa province have trained and supplied a large workforce of tour guides for this industry English is thus a major for tour guide graduates who will use English at workplace very frequently and who will work at travel agencies as tour guides in guided tours for English-speaking tourists from the UK, America, Australia, New Zealand and other nations Therefore, the first requirement is that tour guide students have to be competent at English speaking in order to work in the professional field with necessary knowledge of culture, society and communication in English The second is the sense of humour which is indispensable for their future job since foreign tourists do not just hope to know much about the place they are visiting but to enjoy their trips with fun However, up to now, at the universities and colleges, there have not been any particular programs or syllabus to help the tour guide students at least to develop their ability to make sense of humour in English jokes The tour guide training program is a load with major subjects mainly for training English language skills but with almost no element in helping students to develop their sense of humour in English for their future job as an international tour guide According to the training program outcome, the TGUs are supposed to get B2 English proficiency under the National Framework of Reference for Six-level Foreign Language Competencies (NFRSFLC, MoET, 2014) Accordingly, there has been a tendency towards increasingly teaching how to speak English well and engaging in professional subjects of Tourist presentation, Translation and Cross-culture without any course on humour This fact remains that tour guide students are largely short of the most powerful professional capacity of humour which they should be helped to develop (MoET, 2009) Thus, the ability to make sense of humour in English jokes is timely developed for tour guide students at university and colledge.
Research questions
One research question that the present study sought to answer is as follows
To what extent do the EFL tour guide students make sense of humour in English jokes through authentic materials?
On the focus of the overarching question, there are three sub-questions
1 What are the criteria and strategies for selecting appropriate authentic materials to help develop EFL tour guide students‘ ability to make sense of humour in English jokes?
2 What problems do the tour guide students face in comprehending and telling English jokes?
3 How much can the EFL tour guide students interpret humour in English jokes and tell English jokes?
Key terms and definitions
Humour
Humour is the (i) ―quality of being amusing or comic‖; and (ii) ―ability to appreciate things, situations or people that are comic, ability to be amused‖ (Oxford Advanced Learner‘s Encyclopedia, 1992: 442) It is partially one element of the comic – as wit, fun, nonsense, sarcasm, ridicule, satire, or irony – and basically denotes a smiling attitude toward life and its imperfections: an understanding of the incongruities of existence (Ruch, 1998).
Sense of humour
Sense of humour is understood with reference to both humour creation and humour appreciation (Eysenck, 1972) It is regarded as a mood, a frame of mind, a virtue, a talent and personality trait (Ruch, 1998).
Cognitive-perceptual processes in humour
Cognition is a particular characteristic of humour To produce humour, an individual needs to mentally process information coming from the environment or from memory, playing with ideas, words, or actions in a creative way, and thereby generating a witty verbal utterance or a comical nonverbal action that is perceived by others to be funny In the reception of humour, we take in information (something someone says or does, or something we read) through our eyes and ears, process the meaning of this information, and appraise it as nonserious, playful, and humorous Cognitive processes underly the perception and appreciation of humour (Martin, 2007).
Humour comprehension, humour appreciation and humour competence
- Humor comprehension is the ability to perceive relationships or ideas in incongruous ways (Ziv, 1984)
- Humour appreciation is the ability to understand and get pleasure from humorous messages (Ziv, 1984)
- Humour competence is the ability of the native speaker to pass judgements as to the funniness of a text (Raskin, 1985)
A canned joke is ―a humorous short text repeated (almost) verbatim whose content is usually irrelevant to, and dissociated from, the conversation and is geared towards amusement‖ (Dynel, 2009: 11).
Pragmatic competence
Pragmatic competence (PC) is the ability to understand language in context or to interpret the message of interlocutor as it was intended PC is seen as a subcomponent to the more level of communicative competence (Chomsky, 1980;
7.7 “Make sense of” and “Tour guide students’ ability to make sense of humour in English jokes”
- ―Make sense of‖ means understand, appreciate and comprehend (Colin dictionary,
- ―Tour guide students‘ ability to make sense of humour in English jokes‖ refers to two main competencies: (1) Interpreting the humour in English jokes (recognizing, comprehending and appreciating) & (2) Reciting English jokes (agreeing and reciting – the lowest level of humour production).
Authentic materials, authentic texts, authentic English jokes
- ―Authentic materials are any texts written by native English speakers for native English speakers.‖ (Heitler, 2005: 5)
- ―An authentic text is a stretch of real language, produced by a real speaker or writer for a real audience and design to convey a real message of some sort.‖
- Authentic English jokesare the original joke texts produced by and for native English-speaking people since ―they can only meet grammatically well-formed and syntactically complete sentences‖ (Euler, 1991: 63, cited in Mukherjee, 2001)
Study componential schema
A componential schema proposed for the study (Figure 1) was built from the literature review of humour interpretation and recitation through authentic materials such as training needs analysis, materials assessment, intervention and training evaluation The schema consists of two main components or phases:
(1) Phase 1: A materials selection process conducted in two stages namely Stage 1 – Needs analysis andproblem specification; Stage 2 – proposed authentic materials verification and pilotting The findings from Phase 1 address sub-research questions
(2) Phase 2: An intervention - Explicit instruction The findings from Phase 2 address sub-research question 3
The thesis comprises three major parts, namely introduction, development and conclusion The introduction presents the study background, problem statement and other components as aims and objectives, research context, research questions and definitions of key terms relating to the study Next, the development consists of three chapters: chapter one presents a review of literature with many issues correlating humour and jokes, humour competence and pragmatic competence, and authentic materials; chapter two shows the research methodology and procedure for data collection and analysis; chapter three reports the results, findings and discussions The final is conclusion which carries sections of summary, implications for pedagogical practice, limitations and recommendations for further study
Implementation Pre and post-tests
CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.1 Humour and its importance in tourism
Humour is an umbrella term that covers all the synonyms and overlapping meaning of humour and humour-related subjects not only in neutral and positive format such as comic, ridicule, irony, mirth, laughable, jolly, funny, ludicrous, merry, etc but also on negative forms such as sarcasm, satire and ridicule as well (Ruch, 1996;
Attardo, 2014) The 20 th and 21 st century see a series of studies on humour topic towards positive outcomes of using humour in health, education and the workplace (Fabel, 2014)
Sense of humour (SOH) is defined as a person‘s ability to perceive humour
Because of a fact that humour itself does not sound funny or laughable if it is not understandable, sense of humour is a decisive factor That is humour exists, but it needs to be discovered through one's sense of humour (Chapman and Foot, 1976)
SOH is thus a personality trait which refers to one's "humour-related behaviour" because humour is "an attitude of mind rather than an activity of mind" (Ruch,
2007) The term "sense of humour" is also understood with reference to both humour creation and humour appreciation (HA), which is so all-inclusive and highly-prized that Eysenck (1972) remarks "He has a grand sense of humour is also synonymous with: He is intelligent, he's a good sport, and I like him immensely"
(Eysenck, 1972) Thus when a person is said to have sense of humour, he firstly can laugh at things he finds to be funny, laugh a great deal and easily to be amused, and secondly he can tell funny stories and amuse other people (Eysenck, 1972)
However, not all people have SOH always laugh at humour and vice versa, a person who has little SOH can appreciate and laugh at a comic because the HA is an element of the mind while SOH is mostly in favour of in-born (Eysenck, 1972)
Thus it can be stated that sense of humour relates to human behavior and is part of humour in terms of ability
Making sense of humour (MSOH) thus helps a person first understand and discover the fun of an object or a humorous stimulusto appreciate it, and then be able to recite and create humour Tour guides (TG) are the ones who are supposed to have the best SOH One of the six characteristics of great tour guide (Rezdy.com, 2016) mentions that hiring someone who can tell a good joke at the right time is ideal because a tour guide with a good sense of humour will be able to put customers at ease and allow them to truly relax as they enjoy their tours and activities In some cases, tour guides discover humour and use humour and fun as part of their experience offerings for reasons of entertainment and enjoyment An example in Fabel‘s (2014) study shows that happiness appeared when the tour guide said to tourists after their landing in Cape Town: ―Ladies and gentlemen, we have landed in
Cape town Please take all your possessions Anything left behind will be shared equally between staff Please note we do not accept unwanted mothers-in-law or children.‖ However, creating humour by using English jokes helps gain English- speaking tourists‘ attention and put a smile on their face is a burden for Vietnamese tour guides in spite of their own good sense of humour since what one culture can laugh at (superiority), laugh about (incongruity) or laugh in spite of (relief) may vary widely from another country (Geddert, 2012)
It is complicated to classify humour because there is no universal theoretical framework which can satisfactorily account for all types of humour and the functions that they serve Ermida (1968) holds that humor can be either verbal or non-verbal; it can be a subjective experience or serve communicative purposes; it can draw upon common everyday reality or consist of fiction and imagination; it can charm or attack, be created spontaneously or be used as a well-prepared technique of personal and professional interaction; it can be a simple joke told among friends or amount to the sophistication of Shakespeare‘s plays (Ermida,
1968) According to a criterion of language and non-language convey, it is divided into verbal and non-verbal humour Besides, humour is clarified apparently into style and types
Verbal and non-verbal humour
Verbal humour (VB) is firstly defined as a joke-carrying text while non-verbal humour (NVH) is a humorous situation not created, described or expressed by any text (Raskin, 1985) However, not only jokes but also other humorous forms (e.g teasing or neologisms) need to be included in the definition (see Introduction, 7.1)
Later another concept of ―verbalized humour‖, expressed by ―means of a linguistic system‖, is synonymous to the term ―verbal humour‖ used in a broad sense (Attardo, 1994: 96) Similarly, another notion of ―verbally expressed humour‖
(Ritchie, 2004) is introduced mostly mentioning wordplay so is not as popularly used as term ―verbal‖ relating to humour conveyed by means of language (Suls, 1983; Raskin, 1985; Alexander, 1997; Norrick, 2004)
The opposite epithet of ―verbal‖ is ―non-verbal‖, whose humour is ―not conveyed by means of words‖ In social studies of psychology and anthropology, non-verbal refers to body language, collocating with ―non-verbal communication‖ or ―non- verbal aspects of speech‖ (Dynel, 2009) Therefore, humour which is not produced by language but by body and facial gestures, pictures or sounds should best be labeled as non-verbal humour, and further covered with visual, musical and kinetic subtypes Norrick (2004) specifies that some presentation of NVB involves slapsticks, cartoons and joke-teller‘s performance such as his/her body language, accent and other paralinguistic features such as the tone of voice or stammering In addition, even if a non-verbal stimulus (as a picture) is accompanied by a text but humour does not directly result from VB, it is still a case of NVB (Norrick, 2004)
In tourism, verbal humour is popular and acceptable Hence,in the present study, term ―verbal humour‖ is used and―verbal‖ means ―connected to words and their use‖ for its origin from the Latin word ―verbum‖ meaning ―a word‖ (Dynel, 2009)
Styles indicate the ways to express humour (Martin et al., 2003; Stieger et al., 2011;
Gignac et al., 2014) There are two groups of styles of humour which are known by four names as affiliative, self-enhancing, self-defeating and aggressive Affiliative humour style is characterized by making humorous comments and telling jokes and funny anecdotes in order to amuse others and to facilitate relationships.Self- enhancing style humour refers to the use of humor to regulate emotions and cope with stress by maintaining a humorous and cheerful outlook on life By contrast, aggressive humour involves the use of humor for the purpose of demeaning or manipulating others, as in sarcasm, teasing, or ridicule such as racist jokes, sarcasm and disparagement of individuals for the purpose of amusement are of this humour style which is used by people who do not consider the consequences of their jokes, and mainly focus on the entertainment of the listeners Self-defeating humor involves attempts to amuse others by means of excessively self-disparaging humor
People with this style of humour tend to laugh along with others when being taunted and these people may have an implicit feeling of negativity
LITERATURE REVIEW
Humour and its importance in tourism
Humour is an umbrella term that covers all the synonyms and overlapping meaning of humour and humour-related subjects not only in neutral and positive format such as comic, ridicule, irony, mirth, laughable, jolly, funny, ludicrous, merry, etc but also on negative forms such as sarcasm, satire and ridicule as well (Ruch, 1996;
Attardo, 2014) The 20 th and 21 st century see a series of studies on humour topic towards positive outcomes of using humour in health, education and the workplace (Fabel, 2014)
Sense of humour (SOH) is defined as a person‘s ability to perceive humour
Because of a fact that humour itself does not sound funny or laughable if it is not understandable, sense of humour is a decisive factor That is humour exists, but it needs to be discovered through one's sense of humour (Chapman and Foot, 1976)
SOH is thus a personality trait which refers to one's "humour-related behaviour" because humour is "an attitude of mind rather than an activity of mind" (Ruch,
2007) The term "sense of humour" is also understood with reference to both humour creation and humour appreciation (HA), which is so all-inclusive and highly-prized that Eysenck (1972) remarks "He has a grand sense of humour is also synonymous with: He is intelligent, he's a good sport, and I like him immensely"
(Eysenck, 1972) Thus when a person is said to have sense of humour, he firstly can laugh at things he finds to be funny, laugh a great deal and easily to be amused, and secondly he can tell funny stories and amuse other people (Eysenck, 1972)
However, not all people have SOH always laugh at humour and vice versa, a person who has little SOH can appreciate and laugh at a comic because the HA is an element of the mind while SOH is mostly in favour of in-born (Eysenck, 1972)
Thus it can be stated that sense of humour relates to human behavior and is part of humour in terms of ability
Making sense of humour (MSOH) thus helps a person first understand and discover the fun of an object or a humorous stimulusto appreciate it, and then be able to recite and create humour Tour guides (TG) are the ones who are supposed to have the best SOH One of the six characteristics of great tour guide (Rezdy.com, 2016) mentions that hiring someone who can tell a good joke at the right time is ideal because a tour guide with a good sense of humour will be able to put customers at ease and allow them to truly relax as they enjoy their tours and activities In some cases, tour guides discover humour and use humour and fun as part of their experience offerings for reasons of entertainment and enjoyment An example in Fabel‘s (2014) study shows that happiness appeared when the tour guide said to tourists after their landing in Cape Town: ―Ladies and gentlemen, we have landed in
Cape town Please take all your possessions Anything left behind will be shared equally between staff Please note we do not accept unwanted mothers-in-law or children.‖ However, creating humour by using English jokes helps gain English- speaking tourists‘ attention and put a smile on their face is a burden for Vietnamese tour guides in spite of their own good sense of humour since what one culture can laugh at (superiority), laugh about (incongruity) or laugh in spite of (relief) may vary widely from another country (Geddert, 2012)
It is complicated to classify humour because there is no universal theoretical framework which can satisfactorily account for all types of humour and the functions that they serve Ermida (1968) holds that humor can be either verbal or non-verbal; it can be a subjective experience or serve communicative purposes; it can draw upon common everyday reality or consist of fiction and imagination; it can charm or attack, be created spontaneously or be used as a well-prepared technique of personal and professional interaction; it can be a simple joke told among friends or amount to the sophistication of Shakespeare‘s plays (Ermida,
1968) According to a criterion of language and non-language convey, it is divided into verbal and non-verbal humour Besides, humour is clarified apparently into style and types
Verbal and non-verbal humour
Verbal humour (VB) is firstly defined as a joke-carrying text while non-verbal humour (NVH) is a humorous situation not created, described or expressed by any text (Raskin, 1985) However, not only jokes but also other humorous forms (e.g teasing or neologisms) need to be included in the definition (see Introduction, 7.1)
Later another concept of ―verbalized humour‖, expressed by ―means of a linguistic system‖, is synonymous to the term ―verbal humour‖ used in a broad sense (Attardo, 1994: 96) Similarly, another notion of ―verbally expressed humour‖
(Ritchie, 2004) is introduced mostly mentioning wordplay so is not as popularly used as term ―verbal‖ relating to humour conveyed by means of language (Suls, 1983; Raskin, 1985; Alexander, 1997; Norrick, 2004)
The opposite epithet of ―verbal‖ is ―non-verbal‖, whose humour is ―not conveyed by means of words‖ In social studies of psychology and anthropology, non-verbal refers to body language, collocating with ―non-verbal communication‖ or ―non- verbal aspects of speech‖ (Dynel, 2009) Therefore, humour which is not produced by language but by body and facial gestures, pictures or sounds should best be labeled as non-verbal humour, and further covered with visual, musical and kinetic subtypes Norrick (2004) specifies that some presentation of NVB involves slapsticks, cartoons and joke-teller‘s performance such as his/her body language, accent and other paralinguistic features such as the tone of voice or stammering In addition, even if a non-verbal stimulus (as a picture) is accompanied by a text but humour does not directly result from VB, it is still a case of NVB (Norrick, 2004)
In tourism, verbal humour is popular and acceptable Hence,in the present study, term ―verbal humour‖ is used and―verbal‖ means ―connected to words and their use‖ for its origin from the Latin word ―verbum‖ meaning ―a word‖ (Dynel, 2009)
Styles indicate the ways to express humour (Martin et al., 2003; Stieger et al., 2011;
Gignac et al., 2014) There are two groups of styles of humour which are known by four names as affiliative, self-enhancing, self-defeating and aggressive Affiliative humour style is characterized by making humorous comments and telling jokes and funny anecdotes in order to amuse others and to facilitate relationships.Self- enhancing style humour refers to the use of humor to regulate emotions and cope with stress by maintaining a humorous and cheerful outlook on life By contrast, aggressive humour involves the use of humor for the purpose of demeaning or manipulating others, as in sarcasm, teasing, or ridicule such as racist jokes, sarcasm and disparagement of individuals for the purpose of amusement are of this humour style which is used by people who do not consider the consequences of their jokes, and mainly focus on the entertainment of the listeners Self-defeating humor involves attempts to amuse others by means of excessively self-disparaging humor
People with this style of humour tend to laugh along with others when being taunted and these people may have an implicit feeling of negativity
Types refer to the form or message of humour Types of humour are varied and overlapped in naming (Raskin, 1985; Hay, 1995; Alexander, 1997; Bryant et al, 1980; Long and Graesser, 1988; Norrick, 2003).All types of humour have criteria and structures to be distinguished and in some case they are by no means mutually exclusive, for example teasing may entail punning while mockery may involve sarcasm (Dynel, 2009) Table 1.1 presents classification of humour
Gag Crack (jokes) Epigram Observation Quote Pun or wordplay
Blue Caricature Howler Irony Lampoon Misprint Ridicule Sardonic Self-deprecating Satire
Juvenile or prank Role play
Fantasy Impersonate Parody Sardonic Vulgarity
Typically, Alexander (1997) proposes a list of types of humour which are designated by definition and criteria Six criteria ascertain sixteen types of humour
They are (i) intention on part of speaker or writer; (ii) consciousness on part of speaker or writer; (iii) malevolent or benevolent intent; (iv) purpose to amuse people; (v) general light-heartedness; (vi) witty Under Alexander‘s (1997) criteria, joke, gag, epigram and crack are in one group to be ranked in the characteristics of being intentional and conscious, benevolent or non-benevolent and the most part wit and amusement Pun is both intentional and unintentional and same for consciousness Though pun is not in the domain of benevolent, it is classified in state of being the most amusing and light-hearted, whereas, group of spoonerism, howler and misprint are unintentional and unconscious and not amusing either The other group including irony, satire, lampoon, caricature, parody, impersonation, sarcasm and sardonic is amusing but not kind-hearted or humane Hence, group of joke, gag, epigram, crack and puns belonging to verbal humour and in the style of affiliative and self-enhancing humour which are suitable and essential for humour in tourism (Table 1.1) From this division, it can be seen that joke is a type of humour and disguised in different forms This is in the scope of the present study verbal humour is handled in the form of canned joke (Definition 7.5, Introduction)
Authentic materials for developing EFL students‘ ability to make sense of
Authenticity is a term relating to the language produced by native speakers in a particular language community (Porter & Roberts, 1981; Little, Devitt & Singleton,
1989) Accordingly, an authentic text is ―a stretch of real language, produced by a real speaker for a real audience and designed to convey a real message of some sort‖ (Morrow, 1977: 13) Authentic materials refer to the use in teaching of texts, photographs, video selections, and other teaching resources that were not specially prepared for pedagogical purpose (Richards, 2006) Under these definitions, authentic materials in this present study, actually, comprise authentic English jokes which are written and read by natives These differ from the jokes which are translated into English or created by any who are not English-speaking natives It is very significant, because it helps EFL learners have chance to be accessible to truthful joking culture and prepares them for the real world situations of humour in terms of using the target language (Fine and De Soucey, 2005)
1.2.2 Competency-based approach to syllabus/ materials design/ selection 1.2.2.1 An overview of approaches to syllabus/ materials design/ selection
Syllabus and materials designed or selected for language courses often follow such an approach relating to the usage purposes of those courses for a particular group of learners namely English for specific purposes (Hutchinson & Waters, 1989) Now that syllabuses/ materials should be appropriately selected for effective learning, they are supposed to trait an approach as well as possible for courses (Richards,
2006) There are different criteria to identify syllabus/materials design including topic, structural/situational, content-based, functional/notional, skills, discourse, task-based, skills and strategies (Hutchinson & Waters, 1989) Each of the syllabuses presents a valid attempt to break down the mass of a particular area of knowledge These types of syllabus areaccompanied in manyapproaches to course design such as a language-centred, a skills-centred, a learning-centred, the post hoc approach (Hutchinson & Waters, 1989), task-based, objective based, standards- based, needs-based, outcomes-based and competency-based approach (Richards &
As the meaning of the names, each approach describes characteristics concerning its own ways of teaching the language For example, a language-centred syllabus cites an inspiration for the production of texts and exercises and the basis on which proficiency will be evaluated A skills-centred syllabus provides opportunities for learners to employ and evaluate the skills and strategies considered necessary in the target situation and tends to the use of ―authentic texts‖ (Hutchinson & Waters,
1987) A learning-centred approach describes the learning activities with tasks, exercise and teaching techniques Learning in this approach is more than just a matter of presenting language items or skills and strategies but an attention to the activity through which it is learnt, so much consideration to learners‘ interest, enjoyment and envolvement One good point of this approach is that it serves the needs of the students both as users and as learners of the language The post hoc approach is more widespread tending to a cosmetic syllabus with undefined criteria that satisfies many relevant cohorts Competency-based approach focuses on ―what learners are expected to do with the language‖ (Richards & Rodgers, 2001: 141)
All the approaches highlight the needs for learning and any syllabus claims to teach how to communicate according to the development of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) for ESP Richards (2006: 12) states ―many learners needed English in order to use it in specific occupational or educational settings rather than just to concentrate on more general English‖
However, each is framed in only one aspect as topic, structure, functions, content and whatever and places too much emphasis on this aspect For example, the natural and functiona/notional approaches dwell too much on the grammar but less on the lexical.Thus, the best approach would probably be the right combination of the approaches for meaningful learning asthe research to date has not been able to show that any one method or approach produces better results in term of language performance (Krashen and Terrel, 1983) and there should be an integration of eight or some syllabuses into a sensible teaching programme (Swan, 1985b, cited in Hutchinson & Waters, 1987)
Nevertheless, it is not advisable to mix types of syllabus because each type of syllabus reflects the viewpoint and outlook for the outcomes of each course Apparently, each approach has its name defining the characteristics connecting with the language and content of the materials for the course outcomes so if they are mixed the learning objectives might not be achieved (Crombie, 1985a).Moreover, outcomes-based, objectives-based, standards-based and needs-based approaches share background with competency-based and overlap (Nguyen, 2017)
Regarding the purpose of developing the ability to make sense of humour in English jokes, learners need knowledge of humour language and of the world‘s socio- culture Therefore competency-based approach is seen appropriate for the present study since it describes measurably and precisely ―the knowledge, skills and behaviours students should possess at the end of a course of study‖ (Richards &
Competency-based Language Teaching (CBLT) was introduced in the United States in the 1970s and reemerged by late 1980s mainly for developing language programs (Auerbach, 1986) It focuses on the learning outcomes in terms of competencies, which refer to a description of the essential skills, knowledge and attitude required for effective performance of particular tasks and activities‖ (Richard & Rodgers, 2001: 159) More clearly, it is an approach that encompasses the association of knowledge and practicality through real-life tasks to be prepared for subsequent workplace (Richards, 2006) As Richards (2006) remarks competency-based approach describes ―the students‘ ability to apply basic and other skills in situations that are commonly encountered every day‖
(2006: 129) Actually, competencies pertain to dispensable skills for the successful completion of real world activities which may be related to any domain of life connected to the field of work and to social survival in a new environment (Richard, 2006)
As defined by Nkwetisama (2012: 519), in language learning, CBLT means ―using all the grammar, vocabulary, punctuation and pronunciation to communicate effectively in real time listening, speaking, reading and writing situations‖ In addition to this, CBLT consists of ―knowing what to do, where, when and with whom; or, being linguistically, communicatively and sociolinguistically competent with the learned language.‖As such, compare with Grammar Translation, Direct Method, Audiolingual Method, etc which make assumptions about the content of instruction (Richards,
2001),competency-based teaching-learning approach seeks to bridge the wall between school or the classroom and everyday real life
Auerbach (1986) pinpoints eight features which are essential for enforcing CBLT:
(1) A focus on successful functioning in society The goal is to enable students to become autonomous individuals capable of coping with the demands of the world
(2) A focus on life skills Rather than teaching language in isolation, CBLT teaches language as a function of communication about concrete tasks Students are taught just those language form/ skills required by the situations in which they will function These forms are normally determined by needs analysis
(3) Task-or performance-oriented instruction What counts is what students can do as a result of instruction The emphasis is on overt behaviours rather than on knowledge or the ability to talk about language and skills
(4) Modularized instruction Language learning is broken down into meaningful chunks
Objectives are broken into narrowly focused sub-objectives so that both teachers and students can get a clear sense of progress
(5) Outcomes are made explicit Outcomes are public knowledge, known and agreed upon by both learner and teacher They are specified in terms of behavioral objectives so that students know what behaviors are expected of them
Review of previous studies on humour competence
1.3.1 Review of previous studies in other countries
Humour competence has been popularly studied in many countries in the world both in degree names of Bachelor of Art (B.A) and Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D) A summary of
8 typical studies (Table 1.9) provide valuable results and advantageous background for the present study It can be stated that humour competence can be taught
Table 1.9 Summary of the previous studies on humour competence
No Study Degree Teaching goal
B.A Jokes Freshmen Chinese Comprehension T-test Questionnaire
Ph.D Jokes, film clips, cartoons undergraduate students
Turkish Comprehension Quant Joke tests
Li and Chen (2006) did research on detecting EFL college learner‘s perception of ambiguity on joke comprehension with an experiment on female and male students who that EFL college learners acquired better understanding in linguistic jokes, including phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic jokes than in cultural jokes Most of the students who were less proficient learners needed to be promoted linguistic competence Many students did not consider jokes funny due to their lack of the lexicon and experience By researching, they found that the learners could encounter longer jokes in terms of the length of joke comprehension Once more, humorous materials used for teaching which were short and universal so they could assist students who had difficulty or who are passive in learning However, their study did not mention the comprehension of pragmatic jokes or universal jokes which is a type of jokes popular in every language (Schmitz, 2002)
Baldwin (2007) investigated humour perception in the relation between humour and underlying cognitive processes underlying both verbal and non-verbal humour in a sample of healthy young adults Participants including 94 undergraduate psychology students between the ages of 18 and 39 years, watched film clips, listened to jokes and completed a humor comprehension/appreciation inventory developed and measures assessing a range of cognitive abilities hypothesized to underlie humor perception.Both semantic and phonological humour was explored and shown to be associated with different neutral networks Studies suggested that thatverbal reasoning is a core cognitive ability for the comprehension of jokes in which the humor depends on factors other than simple word play Ethnicity played an important role in appreciating humour with cross-cultural differences in which different types of humour are appreciated by differing groups of people
Welo (2009) explored the advantages of English jokes to improve reading comprehension for Thai Students A questionnaire containing five jokes was sent to fifty subjects of English major and French major The jokes were taken from The Reader Digest Magazine following some criteria concerning the length of jokes, joke context, language complexity, and variety of situations Results showed that a majority of the students did not like telling jokes and the most popular jokes the students liked telling were jokes about people, not about jobs The funniest jokes were the ones which did not contain technical terms, jargon, complicated structures, and difficult vocabulary which were followed by unfamiliar situations or expressions The students preferred universal jokes to cultural ones Technique- based words and cultural disparities were obstacles and difficulty for the students to read English jokes These findings were very important for teachers to choose the right jokes for students to practice reading and telling in the English classrooms
However, Welo (2009) caught the thought of students that English jokes could improve their reading comprehension skill, but they failed to find solutions to the problems or the difficulty for better reading comprehension
Emphasizing the significance of teaching verbal humour, including canned jokes and spontaneous conversational humour, Wulf (2010) proposed a humour competence curriculum based on taxonomy of microskills directly drawn from Morain (1991) and Attardo, Hempelmann and diMaio (2002) and Schmitz (2002) Wulf (2010) also suggested a sample activity of teaching telling jokes and collaboratively discussing their meaning in class However, Wulf (2010)‘s curriculum consists of a variety of jokes and humour without a collection of jokes that are suitable for learners Moreover, the curriculum complement is not evaluated and competence of learners is not assessed
On the basis of Wulf (2010)‘s humour competence curriculum, Petkova (2013) did a study on documenting the effect and perceptions of this curriculum in an intensive English program in southern California and also investigating the perceptions of second language learners of English about humour in their native language as compared to perceptions about humour in English Using mixed methods in a quasi- experimental pre-test post-test design, the study found statistically significant improvement in students‘ perceptions and comprehension of comedy video in English after course of instruction
Geddert (2012) examined students‘ responses to types of written humour commonly found in academic settings by having students read and then react to a series of short passages representing actual types of humour found in academic course
Schema theory provided insight at the content level as it is intuitive that if students did not have appropriate background knowledge, they would not understand the author‘s little stress relieving joke In that line of reasoning, Attardo‘s Knowledge Resources essentially said the same that the students had to be in possession of the resources before they were able to perceive humour
Especially, Hodson (2014) in Japan, based on the idea that humour competence can be defined as the capacity to recognize and understand humour and is an important aspect of semantic and pragmatic competence for advanced language learners, had a study about design, implementation, and outcomes of a one-semester programme in humour competence for university EFL students, using a combination of explicit teaching of humour theories and knowledge schema, teacher- and learner-led analysis of humorous texts, and student presentations Both qualitative and quantitative findings from the course were presented Results from a number of measures, including comparisons of participants‘ ratings of the humorous appeal of English jokes with ratings from learners who had received no humour competence instruction, and student use of course content-knowledge to analyse jokes independently, suggest that humour competence training during the course may have aided participants‘ appreciation of English humour
In the course Hodson (2014) used the materials which were in the form of written and spoken with English humorous texts, including jokes and funny stories, and audio- visual materials such as cartoons, movies, and TV comedies, providing plenty of scope for challenging English practice in all skill areas, and helping students to improve their grammar, vocabulary, and cultural knowledge The students were introduced to a variety of humorous materials for discussion, and asked to keep a humour journal to record their responses and opinions Later in the semester, they would find, present, and even create their own humorous materials to share with the class
It is notable that Hudson (2014) used counts and journals effectively The students could appreciate humour and present jokes Many might miss access to their class notes in some activities, but were allowed to use dictionaries, look things up on the internet, or talk freely to friends Results show that Hodson can make categories of the reasons for why the jokes were funny After 7 weeks, groups of four students made presentations on sets of humorous texts Each presentation was preceded, in the previous week, by a teacher presentation on the theoretical background to each joke type, including information on common structural features and themes Student presentations were followed by in-class oral feedback and teacher clarification and amplification of issues were raised during the presentation Moreover, throughout the course, students were required to keep journals, both to keep notes on lectures and presentations, and to record their reactions to the jokes and cartoons introduced in class The degree and quality of journal completion, which varied very widely, was taken into account in determining final course grades Thus, 49 out of the 64 analyses (77%) showed that the students had successfully understood the humour in the joke texts (Hodson, 2014) These findings made way to the present study
However, the findings say that it is not clear that learners were able to satisfy a strict definition of humour competence – that of being able to distinguish humorous from non-humorous texts – at the end of the course The problem is that there was a lack of synchronism in choosing the participants, setting up the research context and posing the purpose of the study Hodson (2014) organized three groups for explicit instruction and got data results for comparison, but the number of students was not the same among the three groups and the students were at three levels of different majoring in training programs from three different universities for each group
Whereas, the study aimed to address one research question if language learners, when provided with specific instruction in theories of humour, information about the forms and structure of humorous texts, and controlled exposure to a variety of such texts, able to display ―humour competence‖
Thus, Hodson (2014) admitted that although the humour ratings of one set of jokes in the experimental group were higher than the ratings of a larger group that had not from non-humorous texts consistently, and to an extent that would satisfy Attardo‘s definition of humour competence There was also no evidence to suggest that either students who performed more strongly in knowledge of course content (as measured either by their humour test scores, or by their references to joke structure elements in the final analyses) or students who tended to find jokes funnier, were more – or indeed less– successful in understanding jokes in the final analysis exercise, or in identifying non-humorous texts correctly (Hodson, 2014) These are taken as lessons for the present study with the students in Vietnam‘s context
1.3.2 Review of previous studies in Viet Nam
In Viet Nam, humour is rarely used in classroom and under no circumstances is humour competence in research Actually, there have been some studies on humour and English jokes mostly in linguistics and a few on humour used in the English classroom They are, for instance, the studies on implicature (Nguyen, 2010), sarcasm expressions (Nguyen, 2011) and the figurative language as devices in the humorous texts of the two languages In education, Nguyen (2004) found linguistic and cultural ambiguities to be barriers to Vietnamese learners at Quy Nhon College in appreciating American one-and-two liners and Phan (2010) discovered some linguistic features of short jokes contributing to some activities for teaching speaking skill at a high school with the aim to use jokes as useful materials to motivate students at high school
Particularly, Pham (2014) has made an empirical study on humour in education to investigate systematically the role of humour in the EFL classroom at universities in
Chapter conclusion and theoretical framework
This chapter has presented the review of the literature withan introduction of the topic of humour, humour in English jokes, making sense of humour in English jokes, authentic materials for making sense of humour in English jokes and review of relevant previous studies to provide the theoretical background for the present study as presented in Figure 1.8
Figure 1.8 Theoretical framework for developing tour guide students’ ability to make sense of humour in English jokes
The proposed materials would be built on the basis of the criteria for authentic text selection in which humour themes for tourism and semantic and pragmatic ambiguities come from Fabel‘s (2014) as the grounding The proposed syllabus is to be design on the guideline of competency-based approach (Richards, 2006) Fabel‘s
(2014) themes of humour would be applied for discovering the factual humour themes used in Viet Nam‘s tourism context Accordingly, the selected set of materials was used to help tour guide students to enhance their ability to make sense of humour in English canned jokes to prepare for future jobs as international tour guides Also an intervention is supposed to be open for tour guide students to affirm the framework effectiveness.
METHODOLOGY
Research design
On account of advantages, mixed methods design has recently been thoroughly described (Cresswel et al., 2003; Cresswel, 2007, 2008b; Morse & Niehaus, 2009;
Cresswell & Clark, 2011) and tended to be popularly used in different fields of research (Grafton et al., 2011; Malina et al., 2011; Pham, 2014; Nguyen, 2016)
Actually, mixed methods research (MMR) is an approach to inquiry and research that combines quantitative and qualitative methods into one study in order to provide a broader perspective Instead of focusing on one type of methodology, mixed methods researchers emphasize the research problem and use all the approaches available in order to come to a better understanding Collecting and analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data are involved in this kind of research The quantitative data include close-ended information that undergoes statistical analysis and results in a numerical representation Qualitative data, on the other hand, is more subjective and open-ended It allows for the voice of the participants to be heard and interpretation of observations One value of MMR is that MMR employs both approaches iteratively or simultaneously to creat a research outcome stronger than either method individually Combined quantitative and qualitative methods enable exploring more complex aspects and relations of the human and social world Quantitative and qualitative data can bridge the gap of the insufficient phenomenological grounding since the evidence and data of each method are likely to be misleading That means in statistics, the data are not representative or are missing observations of key variables and in qualitative method, the interview material does not adequately cover the field of study
Upon the above guidelines, the present study employed an explanatory sequential mixed methods design (Figure 2.1) which involved the collection and analysis of quantitative data followed by the collection and analysis of qualitative data to come to a better understanding (Morse & Niehaus, 2009) One single method was not sufficient for data while mixed methods could help supply a paroramic picture of the phenomena In fact, theoretically there are 6 versions of design and differences in level of interaction, relative priority, timing and point of interface and mixing strategies (Cresswell & Clark, 2011) However, the explanatory sequential design was really suitable for the present study That is because the design contributed to demonstrating good procedures: a two-phase design, quantitative and qualitative data collected at different time, qualitative depending on quantitative results and priority to quantitative data collection (Figure 2.1)
Figure 2.1 Explanatory Sequential Design (Creswell & Clark, 2011)
Truthfully, the present study consisted of two phases: (1) the study for needs and problems to discover criteria and strategies guidingauthentic material seletion and verification; (2) an intervention for finding the outcomes The purpose of this sequential design was to first quantitatively explore with a large sample and then to determine if the quantitative findings generalized to this large sample The first method of the study was survey questionnaires and tests by which quantitative data were collected From this initial exploration, the second method was used to develop assessment measures that could be administered to a smaller sample with qualitative data In the tentative planned qualitative method, data from interviews and observations were collected as depicted in Visual research design (Figure 2.2)
Quantitative data collection and analysis
Qualitative data collection and analysis
Notes: - QUANqual indicates a quantitatively oriented project followed by a qualitative project
- QUAN (uppercase) indicates a dominant project
- qual (lowercase) indicates a less dominant project
Data collection procedure was established into two phases: (1) authentic materials selection and verification, and (2) intervention (Figure 2.3)
Survey questionnaire Interview (Close-ended questions) (Open-ended questions)
Observation (Observational checklist) Quan Data analysis Qual Data analysis
Pre &post- tests Interview (Close-ended and linked (Open-ended questions) open-ended questions)
Descriptive statistics Thematic & Qual Data analysis Merging of quantitative and qualitative data/themes results
Merging of quantitative and qualitative data/themes results
Figure 2.3 Data collection procedure of the study
In Phase 1, research questions 1 and 2 were answered by the data collected and analyzed through survey questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and observations which were ordinarily carried out and integratedly employed in this design Survey questionnaires dealt with perceptions, attitudes and opinions regarding the utility of humour English from real tour guides with international tour guiding missions, humour preference from the international tourists, intention of teaching humour from teachers of English for tourism and humour competence from tour guide students Interviews provided supplementary and explainary data for finding out the needs and specifying problems for criteria and strategies as guidelines of the materials selection and verification Observation handled the
Stage 1 Needs Analysis and problem specification
Stage 2 Materials verification and piloting
Survey questionnaire, Interview: TEFT, TGU
TENTATIVE AUTHENTIC MATERIALS FOR TGU
TGU humour topics in tourism and manner of telling jokes The study participants had various roles and disciplinary backgrounds and were associated with various agencies such as tour guides from Khanh Hoa travel agencies, tourists from different English-speaking countries, teachers and students from colleges and university in Nha Trang Advantageously, the participants were existing and available for response to the study For these reasons the researcher chose to employ a flexible and iterative data collection strategy consisting of two data collection approaches: qualitative and quantitative
Phase 2 held the intervention for answering research question 3, also using both quantitative and qualitative data This phase of the study addressed the extent of the effectiveness of the proposed materials used through an experimental course First, pre-test and post-test were used to gauge the level of improvement in the ability to make sense of the humour in English jokes of the students before and after the intervention A joke-telling context was organized for the students who took part in the intervention as an oral performace test to produce desired results for the study
Performing results were evaluated and collected through quantitative data Then in- depth interviews with the intervention-participating students were conducted as a follow up to the quantitative results from pre/post tests to help explain the quantitative results In this exploratory follow-up, the plan was to explore the rate of humour comprehension and appreciation of TG undergraduates before and after the intervention to cross check with the pre/post tests
In both the phases, qualitative data were attributed to quantitative data and two types of the data were incorporated The significant advantage of mixing both quantitative and qualitative data is that the researcher gained both breadth and depth of understanding of the research problem, while reducing the limitations inherent to applying each single method by itself (Creswell et al, 2011) Moreover, mixed methods research was suitably employed when the researcher wanted to validate the findings obtained from other methods or wanted to continuously regard a research question from different angles to discover potential contradictions (Creswell, 2008b) Hence, data collection was dated in chronologic order (Table 2.1)
Table 2.1 Summary of information and data needed for research questions Research question Research stage
Tour guides Tourists Lecturers Undergraduates
Qualitative Sub-question No 3 Pre- intervention evaluation
August 2016 Undergraduates Pre-test Quantitative
Quantitative Quantitative October 2016 Undergraduates Interview Qualitative
Phase 1 –Materials selection
The first phase of the present study aimed at answering the first two sub-questions: (1)
What are the criteria and strategies for selecting appropriate authentic materials to help develop EFL tour guide students‘ ability to make sense of humour in English canned jokes? And (2) What difficulties do EFL tour guide students face in comprehending and telling English jokes? This phase consisted of two stages which were Needs Analysis (NA) and Materials Verification (MV) Each stage is summarized with a specific description regarding its participants and sampling, data collection instruments and procedure, and data analysis
2.2.1 Stage 1 - Needs analysis 2.2.1.1 Participants and sampling
To serve the purpose of the NA, four groups of participants were recruited: tour guides (TG), foreign tourists (FT), teachers of English for tourism (TEFT) and tour guide undergraduates (TGU) The TGs lived and worked in Nha Trang, the FTs visited Nha Trang city in small and big groups The TEFTs and the TGUs came from two colleges:
(1) Nha Trang College of Art, Culture and Tourism and Nha Trang Teacher‘s Training College which are now merged into Khanh Hoa University and (2) Nha Trang University which is experienced in training tour guides Both the two universities are located in Nha Trang City The FTs on international cruises and tours visited Nha Trang yearly and The TGs worked on these tours and cruises
Based on the principle of sampling by Cohen, Manion and Morrison (2007) and on the purposes of selectivity, the research sample characteristics was chosen in favour of non-probability (different from probability deriving from randoming in wider population) with the strategies of convenience and purposive sampling
Convenience sampling was known asan easy way to access the samples that were selected accidentally or in opportunity.Thus, in this phase – NA and MV, the samples were the foreign tourists who were visiting Nha Trang City and the tour guides who were working in the city At the same time, the tour guide undergraduate students and teachers of English for tourism were captive audiencesserved as respondents They all participated in a comprehensive questionnaire survey Whereas, the purposive sampling was used for finding the sample that was satisfactory to the researcher‘s needs, so in this phase the samples were selected for the interviews and observations as the data was meant to contribute to a better understanding of a theoretical framework and the qualities the participant possesses (Bernard, 2002; Cohen et al.2007) The researcher decided what was needed to be known and set out to find the tour guides and foreign tourists who could and were willing to provide the information by virtue of knowledge or experience and above all could communicate experiences and opinions in an articulate, expressive and reflective manner (Bernard, 2002)
As for the sample size, as Cohen et al (2007) say, there is no clear-cut answer for the correct sample size which depends on the purpose of the study and the nature of the population under scrutiny, but they advise the larger the sample the better, and a sample size of thirty is the minimum number of cases if researcher use some form of statistical analysis on their data However, for convenience, the sample size required is obtained for those who are available and accessible at the time and for purposive sampling, the samples are handpicked for the researcher‘s needs (Cohen et al., 2007) Thus, the number of the TGUs samples was a total of 69 The number of the TEFTs was 11 The number of TGs was 18, and the number of FTs including male, female, old and young was 88 in total (Table 2.2)
Participant group TGs FTs TEFTs TGUs
Semi-structured interviews were conducted after the survey questionnaire on the purpose of adding more information for the survey results as Long (2005) suggests different sources should help data interpreted validly and incredibly Hence, the respondents were purposively selected since they were knowledgeable and experienced to be representative for the whole population and provide reliable information The interviews were organized in the workplace during the travelling tours and at a coffee house The respondents participating in the interviews were 03 TGs, 04FTs, and 18 TGUs (Appendix 18) Particularly, the tour guides required had more than 15years of working experience and found to be enthusiastic with the tour guiding job so that their opinions would be representative and persuasive for the data.The number of TGU was 18 at Khanh Hoa University who were sorted out from three classes to be interviewed for clarifying difficulties in reading English jokes.However, there was no interview with the TEFT because they said they did not know about or use humour in teaching English for tourism students Moreover, their answers in the questionnaire were quite decisive and explicit
Unstructured observations were carried out outside in the workplace According to Kothari (2004), the advantages that subjective bias in research is eliminated when observation is done accurately, the currency of the fact rises and the independence of the subject in giving response make data more valid and reliable Kothari (2004) also reminds that in order to attain effective data researcher should decide what to observe Therefore, two TGs were purposively selected to be observed to know if and how they could tell jokes in English during the tours The observation also aimed at discovering the topics that were able to make tourists laugh There were two typical international tours in Nha Trang from cruises which arrived at Nha Trang port in their itineraries for international tourists visiting Nha Trang for 4 hours: (1) Nha Trang City tour and (2) Nha Trang Village tour The samples for observation were picked from the two tours: one round Nha Trang City and one to a village, which were guided by two Vietnamese tour guides with 56 tourists in each tour (Table 2.2) The observations were done on buses where TGs were at work and observed instantaneously so that the subjects could be observed while they were implementing their job naturally and genuinely
Survey questionnaire, interview questions and observation accounts were administrated
There were 4 kinds of questionnaire to be composed for TG, FT, TEFT and TGU
The ones for FT and TEFT were in English while the ones for TG and TGU in Vietnamese, which was the best way to get good and genuine information from every cohort
The structure of the questionnaires was made in clusters of closed-ended questions which were quite flexible and long enough for the cohorts to understand and supply necessary information One special point is that the open-ended questions were not included in the questionnaires to avoid one major disadvantage That is this program was quite new for the respondents in the investigation, so it is possible that the superficiality of the questions might irritate the students and force them to produce inaccurate and bias information Thus, in order to have the data analysis to be more convenient for the researcher to discover reliable facts (Nunan, 1991), the questionnaire was thus characterized by:
Prescribing wording and order of questions to ensure that each participant receives the same formality
Prescribing definitions or explanations for each question, to ensure that the researcher handles the questions consistently and can answer participants' requests for clarification if they occur
Prescribing the response format to enable rapid completion of the questionnaire during the working process
For content, in general the questionnaires carried some overlapping in groups, i.e the ones ofTG and FT, of TG and TGU, of TEFT and TGU so that there was a correlation and sequence in findings (Appendix 1, 2, 3, 4) The questionnaire for TG and TGU contained questions of difficulties in telling jokes and preference in learning jokes, the questionnaire for TG and FT embraced the situations for jokes and humour topic for tourists and the questionnaire for TG, TEFT and TGU included the necessity of learning English joke This is a specialility in the design of the questionnaires that the researcher could see the similarity and disparities of the output Among them, the questionnaires for TG and TEFT each was a comprehensive panel consisting of important items that drew out opinions abouthumour in curriculum, topics of jokes, learning materials, teaching methods, learners‘ problems in comprehending jokes and suitable types of humour in classroom.All the questionnaires were useful since they helped the researcher see the background of the respondents on the participants‘ attitudes, points of view, self-assessment, decision and humour competence for an intention to build a kind of authentic materials for teaching humour and English jokes for TGU
Interview was a flexible tool for data collection in this study, enabling multi-sensory channels to be used: verbal, non-verbal, spoken and heard The purposes of the interview were to evaluate or assess respondents‘ opinions to judge whether they match the ideas collected in the survey questionnaires The types of interviews typically and mostly were semi-structured ones (Cohen et al., 2007) With some arranged questions, the interviewer (also the researcher) had good preparations and directions for better answers from the interviewees Semi-structured interview was also both carefully planned with the content, sequence and wording in hand of the interviewer and by this way, the interviewees tended to provide authorized information from objective views (Cohen et al., 2007), so that they are able to talk freely and sincerely about their experiences for deep, authentic and honest information (Openheim, 1992)
Moreover, at the interviews the researcher could ask additional questions and the TG, FT and TGU could give adequate and true answers Actually, interviews could help probe misunderstanding during the investigation, encouraged cooperation and established rapport for providing appropriate information to facilitate the teaching/learning of English jokes in the following phase
There were three rounds of interviews which were conducted with TGs, FTs and TGUs They were all semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions (Appendix 5) The first round aiming at finding opinions about humour styles and joke topics took place with TG The interviewer put some keys questions to define the areas to explore and explain The areas covered the needs of humour in tourguiding and topics of jokes to be used for foreign tourists The second round was conducted with the 4 tourists from England, America, Australia and Chinese who were visiting Nha Trang The questions prepared for the interviews were quite similar with the ones in the questionnaire but open-ended so that the subject could answer naturally and add more realistic information about their trips These two rounds mainly focused on humour preference and topics used in tourism The third round was with 18 tour guide undergraduates at Khanh Hoa University aiming at categorizing tour guide undergraduates‘ difficulties in appreciating humour in English jokes The students were singled out from the existing three classes of TGUs The sample selecting key was based on the results of the marks of Listening and Speaking Test 4 which they studied in the semester (Appendix 16), so it could be seen that the samples included students with both good and average marks of English speaking skill The students were asked to read authentic English jokes in some joke books which contained linguistic, cultural and reality-based ambiguities and then individually answered the interviewer‘s questions
Observation was a delicate instrument in Phase 1 of the present study since it revealed a real-life way and manner that experienced tour guides performed in joke- telling on guided tours Observation data was really necessary for the researcher to set up criteria and strategies for teaching the materials
Actually, according to Cohen et al (2007), observation is a process to offer the opportunity to gather "live" data from naturally occurring social situations
Phase 2: Intervention
The intervention in the present study aimed at answering sub-question (3): How much can EFL tour guide students interpret humour in English jokes and tell jokes?
The problems of TG undergraduates were identified in the NA and the proposed authentic materials were used as a teaching source for instruction in the intervention course
Participants were the ones non-randomly selected taking the course as a treatment group This non-random selection was sampled to ensure adequate representation in the final sample The quantity of sample comprising 20 students in fact according to the statistics could not represent for a whole number of the students who were TG undergraduates at Khanh Hoa University However, in this study, the participants were used as a sample for the course for a comparison of their level of humour appreciation before and after the treatment
The participants were EFL TGU students who received formal classroom instruction in English as a foreign language at the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Khanh Hoa University According to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe, 2011), at this level the subjects‘ language competence corresponds to B1 Due to institutional and administrative constraints, it was not possible to assign subjects randomly to the treatment group Thus, we made sure that the population in this study was matched for subject variables as much as possible as Schmitz (2002) says L2 learners can approach any types and levels of English jokes Therefore, the English level of these subjects was suitable for this study and equivalent to the requirement of enhancing their interpretation of humour in English jokes through the authentic materials
The mean age of this treatment group was twenty years and females outnumbered males All of them had received formal instruction in English for 2 years at the university and for some years at high school Most of them did not have frequent contact with English-speaking people before This group was given explicit instruction of humour in English jokes through authentic materials and was tested before and after the study
In order to control extraneous variables, such as teachers‘ personalities, teaching styles and methods, and to ensure that the students only received the conventional instruction of translation from English to Vietnamese when it came to the English jokes during the study, the researcher taught the students Three English-speaking native speakers were invited to participate in the instruction with the researcher also as a teacher Four colleagues of the faculty were invited to observe both the treatment sessions and the administration of the pretests and posttests to record any valuable information that may have arisen and to check that what was planned did not differ from what was actually carried out
(1) Joke comprehension test in the form of questionnaire
There are different tools used for diagnosing humour-related states and traits Test is a popular instrument for measuring humour comprehension and humour appreciation in this field of research (Ruch, 2007) Freingold and Mazella (1991) developed tests to assess what they refer to verbal and they measure humour cognition with tests of humour reasoning and joke comprehension Furthermore, pre and post tests are of prior use for assessment particularly in experimental research, according to the competency-based language teaching principles (Auerbach, 1986)
A questionnaire test was chosen as the data gathering instrument to assess our subjects‘ performance Both of the pretest and posttest were designed similarly with two parts: one was a completion test and the other part was a multiple choice In the pretest, the test had 2 parts Part 1 was about the ability to make sense of humour in English jokes before learning to comprehend English jokes (including 12 jokes for learning to comprehend English jokes and things the subjects would like to do in a class of making sense of humour in English jokes) Part 2 was about the subjects‘ difficulties in comprehending jokes before learning to comprehend English jokes (including 5 questions for 5 factors) The design of the questions was based on the analysis of the needs of the tourists, tour guides, teachers and tour guide students and the competencies to be enhanced (Appendix 8)
The posttest also contained 2 parts Part 1 was to measure the ability to make sense of humour in English jokes after learning to comprehend English jokes (including the same 12 jokes as in the pretest, questions about the difficulties after learning to comprehend English jokes and their attitudes towards the intervention) Part 2 was about the subjects‘ difficulties in perceiving jokes after learning to understand English jokes (including the same 5 questions of 5 factors as in the pretest)
The 12 jokes in the tests were the ones being linguistic, cultural and reality-based, with the ambiguities of humour including (1) polysemy, (2) morpheme, (3) speech acts – locutionary, (4) homophone, (5) lexis, (6) relevance, (7) speech acts – illocutionary, (8) Grice‘s maxim of manner, (9) Grice‘s maxim of relation, (10) syntax, (11) speech acts – perlocutionary, (12) Grice‘s maxim of quantity (Appendix 9) The requirements were imposed for each joke as a question rating between 0 and 1.0 marks equivalent to (1) no recognition, (2) recognition (3) understanding and interpreting according to the competencies to be setup (Table 1.5) Though the jokes used for the tests were different form the ones learned in the materials, they were made up of the same ambiguities as those
The students did the pretest and posttest which carried the same content Table 2.3 describes the joke test (T1 & T2) The test contained 3 types of jokes: linguistic (joke 1, 2, 4, 5 and 10), reality-based (joke 3, 8, 11 and 12) and cultural (joke 6, 7 and 9) Each joke of the tests was designed for a typical ambiguity of humour
Table 2.3 Description of joke test
Joke categories Subcategories Joke number
Morphological ambiguity J2 Phonological ambiguity J4 Syntactic ambiguity J10 Cultural jokes Cultural ambiguity J6, J7, J9 Reality-based jokes Pragmatic ambiguity J3, J8, J11, J12
In order to get valid information for the results of the tests, informants were found being English, Australian, and Canadan, who were asked to answer some demographic questions and explain the funny points of the same jokes as the ones used in the pretest and posttest (Appendix 10) The joke test given to the informants was the same as the one given to the subjects
The students were pretested before the study with the purpose of obtaining both an overview of their ability to make sense of humour in English jokes and to have a benchmark against which to measure the progress of the experimental group after the treatment The pretest was administered to all the population in the study one week before the treatment so as to eliminate any pretest effect on the treatment (Takahashi, 2001) The same test was delivered as posttest after the treatment and at the end of the course
A joke-telling contest was organized with the participation of the TGUs who had experienced the course after the comprehension post test Vietnamese and foreign teachers played as foreign tourists and the TGUs took part in the contest telling English jokes.A joke-telling contest was organized for the TGU students who took the course of learning English jokes and 15 students enrolled in the contest
The aim of the contest was to measure the TGUs‘ humour competence through their performance Seven judges were portrayed as a group of tourists comprising of one American, one Australian, one Polish and three Vietnamese teachers who taught English for the TGU students Each contestant received a quiz written ―You are guiding a group of foreign visitors Set up a situation and tell a joke.‖ With this quiz, the contestant invented a situation and told a joke Evaluation paper was created in the form of a checklist which was made up of two benchmarks: (1) Fun and (2) Quality The fun degree was rated at four levels from ―not funny‖, ―slightly funny‖, ―funny‖ and ―very funny‖ In parallel, the quality degree ranged from ―poor‖, ―fair‖, ―good‖ and ―very good‖ ―Poor‖ means the candidate can tell a full story but badly, ―fair‖ means the candidate can tell a full story with good pronunciation, ―good‖ means he can tell with good pronunciation and gesture and ―very good‖ means he can tell with good pronunciation, good gesture and his joke makes the audience laugh, which followed the competencies (4, 5, 6) to be setup (Table 1.5) (Appendix 12)
Interview was conducted to clarify the results of the post-test The participants were interviewed in order to capture their comprehension of the English jokes they read in the post-test and at the same time their feelings and opinions about the materials, and were asked if they considered the class had helped them understand the humor in English jokes or if it had allowed them to learn foreign culture in the target language or culture The interviews were done the week after classes had ended
The students were divided into two groups; the one who got above six marks and the other getting below six The students were randomized in the stratified sampling strategy for interviews which lasted between 15 or 20 minutes 6 students were sorted out the 20 ones and interviewed individually and the researcher was an interviewer The interview protocol consisted of seven questions that directly addressed the subjects described above
Significance of quantitative data and qualitative data integration
A two-phase sequential design provided data to be collected first and used statistical analysis to determine which findings to augment in the next phase The data were accordingly characterized of both quantitative and qualitative ones Quantitative data were measurably formulated from facts and uncovered the phenomenon of the needs of learning English jokes with comprehensive paper surveys conducted In parallel, qualitative data were rallied from individual interviews to provide confirmation for the results These two phases occur through the research procedure of the study Combining data from quantitative and qualitative methods assisted the researcher to obtain a deep understanding, high reliability and good validity of the findings (Allwright & Bailey, 1991; McDonough & McDonough, 1997; Silverman
Validity was seen as the soundness and cogency of the data In other words, the qualitative data were to be honest, deep and rich and the scope of the data was achieved The data tended to attain the ―understanding‖ as the valid evidence of the research was the accounts from the participants, not the methods or the data (Mishler, 1990) Moreover, the researcher was not completely objective to the research, but a part of the research, penetrating into the research perspectives and uncovering these with honesty of self-reporting (Mishler, 1990) The present study consequently achieved internal and external validity (Schofield, 1990; LeCompte and Preissle, 1993, cited in Cohen et al., 2007) Actually, the triangulation of collecting data methods such as survey questionnaires, interviews and observation make the results of the data be convincing, accurate, trustworthy and approvable
Together, it is obvious that the pre-post-test one group experiment - a clear, detailed and in-depth description could help decide the extent to which findings from one piece of research on a group of tour guide students would be generalizable and applicable to other situations (Cohen et al., 2007)
The present study is in favour of fidelity to real life, context and situation specificity, authenticity, comprehensiveness, detail, honesty, depth of response and meaningfulness to the respondents The survey questionnaire data provided by different samples of TG, FT, TEFT, and TGU were anonymous, varied and authentic They encouraged more honesty when the samples had to see the practicality of the research to their study and work About the interview, open- ended questions enabled respondents to demonstrate their unique way of looking at the world though own opinions were often inclined to offer bias but they were explained by data from the unstructured observations However, the number of respondents can clear up misunderstanding About the class learning procedure, the presence of a native speaker as class participant made the students feel ease, self- confident and passionate in appreciating interesting jokes The data were consequently honest and trustworthy.
Chapter conclusion
With the objective to develop tour guide students' ability to make sense of humour in English jokes through authentic materials, the present study was done on the basis of sequential explanatory mixed methods design It encompassed two phases:
(1) surveys to analyze needs, selecting jokes and proposing authentic humorous materials and specifying problems for treatment; and (2) an intervention within a pre-posttest experiment to assess the effectiveness of the treatment At first, a survey was conducted in Nha Trang city for a comprehensive and confident source of data so as to produce practical and reliable materials Later, a treatment was done for an experimental group of tour guiding students at Khanh Hoa Universtity
Though one big disadvantage of the research was time-consuming, it was valid for the study because it provides ―a unique example of real people in real situations, which enables the researcher to understand ideas more clearly than simply by presenting them with abstract theories or principles‖ (Cohen et al., 2007) Mixed methods with a sequence of quantitative and qualitative data collection got significant and sound for use in the present study Though the procedure is quite complicated, they provide a ponaramic picture and strengthen the research results
Consequently, quantitative and qualitative data were dependable and supportive for practical and reliable results.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
Phase 1 –Materials selection
3.1.1 Stage 1- Results from needs analysis
Data of needs analysis (NA) comprises results from survey questionnaire and interview data Results of the analyses of these data help to prepare the proposed materials for developing the tour guide students‘ ability to make sense of humour in English jokes All the results of the survey questionnaire were analyzed in tables and charts
(1) Tour guide undergraduates’ lack of humorous language
Most of the students did not know about humour and English jokes (Appendix 13) The frequency of jokes telling shows a negativeresult that 1.5% usually, 16.9% sometimes and 67.7% never told jokes in English in the classroom Similarly, more than 80% of the students never told any jokes in English or English jokes to English-speaking people
There were two reasons for this One reason was that the students tried to learn English for presentation at the tourist attractions rather than for joking, so most of their time was spent on English language skills at college The other was for the fact that the training curriculum for tourism education did not have any course for telling jokes in English
The teachers even did not know much about such a course of English jokes Nearly three quarters of the teachers rarely (33.4%) and never (41.7%) taught jokes to tour guide students because there was never any syllabus for joke teaching Moreover, approximately 90% of the teachers thought that English jokes were difficult for students to understand due to their limitation of vocabulary, grammar, speaking; especially around 83.4% believed that the students could not comprehend jokes due to their poor skill of listening in English Thus, most of the students did not have an opportunity to hear jokes in their English classrooms nor having any lessons about jokes at college This made them feel unprepared and so fearful and unconfident to tell jokes in front of a crowd of foreigners
Telling jokes in English was not easy for EFL Vietnamese students It was more difficult when EFL Vietnamese TG students had to deliver jokes in English to English-speaking tourists Figure 3.1 and Figure 3.2 show a comparison of these difficulties between the students and the tour guides
Figure 3.1 shows all categories recording very difficult scores, with listening and culture being the highest at 13.9% and 12.1% respectively Grammar and vocabulary showed the lowest responses here Responses in the difficult category were all quite high ranging from 20.6% for shyness up to 51.7% for vocabulary Combining the three difficult groupings led to a 100% response rate for grammar, with no undergraduates marking this as not difficult at all Only the personality traits of shyness and humour recorded high scores for not difficult at all, at 24.1% and 22.4% respectively
Figure 3.1 Tour guide undergraduates' difficulties in telling jokes
Figure 3.1 shows that the students found it much more difficult to tell jokes for many reasons The biggest obstacles were vocabulary, grammar and speaking It is
Vocabulary Grammar Speaking Listening Culture Humour Shyness
Very difficult difficult Slightly difficult Not difficult at all true that the students were notknowledgeable enough at English vocabulary and grammar, so they hesitated to make jokes in front of foreign people, while the tour guides were professionals and could tell jokes with ease Besides, culture and humour discouraged them from joking Although being good at English, the tour guides also had some slight difficulty with culture in telling jokes The data show that the tour guides were not always successful in telling jokes to foreign tourists
Surely, Vietnamese culture is quite different from that of Europe and America in some aspects It indicates that the students need to learn jokes and they would sequentially take chance of speaking, listening English and building humour sense through jokes
Figure 3.2 Tour guides' difficulties in telling jokes
Overall, Figure 3.2 releases a majority of respondents with less difficulty telling jokes, no responses in the very difficult category and all categories showing at least 50% of not difficult at all responses For this answer, the lowest score was 58.3% for grammar, increasing to 75% for sense of humour For reasons that obtained a
Vocabulary Grammar Speaking Listening Culture of joking Humour sense Shyness
Very difficult Difficult Slightly difficult not difficult at all language learning, namely grammar and vocabulary, while the other two were more concerned with personality (shyness and sense of humour) Combining difficult and slightly difficult responses revealed that grammar and vocabulary were the biggest problems, with the culture of joking also causing a high degree of difficulty
(3) Agreement on the need of learing English jokes
All the teachers believed that learning jokes helped enhance learners‘ humour sense, but worried about the obstacles of learners‘ low level language skills and joking culture on the learning Obviously, the teachers were quite experienced in using jokes for their teaching, but teaching jokes as a course book was still controversial Actually, the teachers expressed their hesitancy in the interviews Concerning jokes and cultures, some teachers felt afraid that their students hardly understood English jokes right after hearing them because of students‘ weaknesses in English as well as the difference of the cultures They, thus, thought that culture should be taught more than jokes or at least before learning jokes because when understanding culture, students could understand English jokes and know how to tell them to the tourists appropriately
Whereas, other teachers claimed that cultures were quite difficult to understand for the Vietnamese students because culture is at present a big field of study in the curriculum, while the students only needed some basic humour skills necessary for the tour guiding job Thus, around 65% of the teachers agreed on a course on the art of telling English jokes for tour guide students Most of them (91.7%) did not agree with organizing an independent course or a compulsory course in the training curriculum They, however, suggested that such a course should be a selective one in the training program
Figure 3.3 Agreement on the need to learn and teach jokes
Figure 3.3 of agreement on learning and teaching jokes indicate that tour guides were the most in favour of the course with 50% strongly agreeing, 30% agreeing
However, 18% disagreed and 3% strongly disagreed Therefore, there were significantly differing opinions within this category of participants Both teachers and students were more positive overall, with teachers recording 60% agreement and 5% strongly agreeing But there were also 35% disagreeing Students were the most positive of the three respondent groups They had a total of 95% in agreement, with 80% agreeing and 15% strongly agreeing A 5% minority disagreed
Yet, the teachers thought that students could learn jokes at any level of English proficiency and suggested a course of 12-hour length (similar to one credit in the training program), with more development of language skills and culture in integration
(4) Tourists’ favourite joke types and topics
Types and topics of jokes were diversified according to the tourists‘ preferences
Figure 3.4 and Figure 3.5 show tourists' favourite types and topics of jokes
Figure 3.4 Tourists' favourite types of jokes
Concerning types of jokes, short funny stories and one or two liner jokes were the most popular among all age groups of tourists, with long funny stories being the least popular Short funny stories were the most popular among three age groups (17-30 years old, 55-70 and 70+) while one and two liners were most popular with 30-40 year olds and the 55-70 group, the latter also preferred funny riddles to the same extent Only one and two liners and short funny stories received over 50% of preference from all age groups, although joking across cultures nearly reached this level, with two scores at 49 and 47.1% Puns were unpopular with 40-55 year olds and the highest rating for long funny stories was 30.1% from the 30-40 group
Long funny stories Short funny stories Funny riddles Puns (Play on words) One-and two-liner jokes Joking on the cross cultures
Figure 3.5 Tourists' favourite topics of jokes
Phase two – Intervention
In Phase 2, an instruction using the proposed set of authentic materials was carried out and lasted for 8 weeks with pre-and post-tests Students' learning outcomes on joke interpretation were assessed after the instruction The following part presented the results and discussions onthe proposed material utility and practicality Results of test data before and after the intervention start this section
3.2.1 Results of pre-post tests of humour interpretation in English joke 3.2.1.1 Description of the process of learning
The class consisted of five 150-minute sessions taught in a regular classroom at Khanh Hoa University The researcher taught the students learning jokes and telling jokes and observed the progress of the students The process of the learning was implemented with the help of the Teacher's book and three native speakers who were one Englishman, one American and one Australian The purpose of the class was to provide the students with samples of English jokes which were easily found in books and on the internet and saw how students interacted with the created materials, as well as how much they were able to understand and appreciate English jokes The video clips, cartoons and handouts based on the content in the authentic materials were shown in all classes Students worked in small groups and interacted with each other through tasks and exercises They read and listened to jokes and appreciated them, saying whether they found them funny or not and told why The foreign teachers explained the funny points of the jokes or the Western cultures in the jokes and had joke and cultural exchange with students
When comprehending the jokes, the students were divided into groups for role playing
Teacher initiated a situation and the students did the brainstorming and played roles of tour guide and tourists The students knew what they were going to do, who they were going to tell jokes, where and when they were going to be Then they played role of tour guide telling jokes and tourists hearing the jokes After running the role play the students raised questions and solved the problems Outside the classroom, groups of students invited foreign teachers and tourists to coffee houses for communicating, introducing Vietnamese lifestyle, foods, drinks, etc and telling jokes The tourists and students told and heard English jokes in coffee houses
After eight weeks learning, all the students said they liked learning jokes They were eager to telling jokes and hearing jokes They were absolutely keen on finding out the funny points of the jokes in the ambiguities of linguistics, reality and culture They could understand jokes quickly and participate in humorous conversations.They could use good humorous language in telling jokes and tell joke correctly with the audience, at the right time and right place The number of the students regularly joined humorous conversations It can be seen that the students were better at the speaking skill and felt fun with stories and hilarious episodes in class This is displayed in the pre-and post-test
It is sure that the material provided quite easy language for understanding, basic culture for comprehension and it focused on skills of telling jokes so that they not only could appreciate jokes and also tell jokes The number of the students joined in telling jokes in class fantastically increased in the last three weeks of the course shows that the lessons of the course attracted the students and when the students joined into telling jokes their language and humour skills were developed This evidence can be seen through the telling-joke contest at the end of the course
The number of students participating in the intervention was 20 and all came from Khanh Hoa University which is located in Nha Trang City Their age ranged from nineteen to twenty one Two of them were male and nineteen were female They were the third-year students and expected to graduate from university Their English competence was at the level of pre-intermediate with good grammar and communication at the expertise of three-year college training
The intervention course took place at Khanh Hoa University in Nha Trang City for six sessions in eight weeks Each week they had one dayclassroom learning which lasted 150 minutes The total course was 16 hours long The materials were handed out to the students Lesson plan and classroom observation were made for each lesson (Appendix 23)
3.2.1.2 Pre-post test data results
Data were collected one weekbefore the beginning of the intervention and one week after the intervention period with the instruments of two tests for the intervened students To compare how common the phenomenon under study, the data were later analysed statistically, using the software package of SPSS The tour guide students participating in the intervention obtained a score of 1 if they could point out the funny point and explain it correctly If they could identify the funny point but fail to explain why it is funny, they receive a score of 0.5 If they did not find the correct funny point, they received a score of 0 The mean and the standard deviation were calculated for each joke and for the jokes altogether in the pre-test (T1) and post-test (T2) (Appendix
16) Also, in order to ascertain that the differences to be observed between T1 and T2 within the group were statistically significant, t-test procedures were used to analyse the data from the T1 and T2 The p-value obtained from the t-tests applied in this study were set the standard 0.05 level (95% confidence) to determine the statistical significance of the results and to prove the differences between the T1 and T2 within the group to be the result of the treatment and not due to chance
Figure 3.9 illustrates the mean of each joke in T1 and T2 In general, the result after the treatment was much greater than that before the treatment Moreover, the Sig (2-tailed) item in Figure 3.10 presents a smaller p value The t-test resultsthus ascertains that the difference between T1 and T2 was statistically significant for all the jokes (with all the p values of lower than 0.05) and that the progress was made by the treatment, not by chance Regarding the result of T2, the highest mean score was 0.8885 for joke 7, followed by those for joke 3, 4, 10, 11 and 12 at 0.8000, 0.8000, 0.7000 and 0.7000 respectively The mean scores for joke 1, 6 and 8 were just above the average with 0.6000, 0.5750 and 0.6000 respectively Joke 2 and 5 ranged between the scores of 0.3750 and 0.4750 The lowest value in T2 was for joke 9 with the mean of only 0.2000
As being illustrated by Figure 3.8 and Figure 3.9, many students scored 0in T1 before joining the instructional intervention on humour in English jokes but they improved their scores in T2
Figure 3.8 Illustrating the mean of each joke in T1 and T2
Figure 3.9 Statistically Significant Difference between T1 and T2
Table 3.8 shows the percentage of the score on each joke that the subject achieved
Joke 1 measured the subjects‘ ability to interpret humour related to polysemy
Before the treatment, more than half of the subjects could not find the ambiguity of
Mean of Jokes in T1 and T2
Pair1 Pair 2 Pair 3 Pair 4 Pair 5 Pair 6 Pair 7 Pair 8 Pair 9 Pair
Sig (2-tailed) humour in the joke, but after the treatment, this number was reduced to only 25% and the number of the students was able to recognize the funny point, getting the score of 0.5 and explain the humour of this joke, attaining the score of 1 The result indicated that the subjects could explain the humour of this joke, which proved this ambiguity not to be difficult for the students
Table 3.8: Percentage of the scores of the subjects
Joke 2 contained the humour ambiguity of morpheme Nearly all the subjects scored nothing in T1, but they made much progress in T2 with 35% scoring 0.5 and 20% scoring 1 for the joke However, the number of the subjects who got score of 0 was the highest of all This proved that such linguistic jokes as ones related to morpheme were various and quite difficult for the L2 students to recognize the humour points
Joke 3 showed better improvement when the percentage of students scoring 0 was reduced from 25% in T1 to 0% in T2 while the percentage of students scoring 1 was increased from 5% in T1 to 60% in T2 This indicated that more than half of the subjects could identify and explain the funny point of this reality-based joke containing the humour ambiguity of speech acts – illocutionary and that this type of ambiguity could be much improved by such treatment
Joke 4 tested the students‘ ability to make sense of humour in English jokes related to homophone In T1, 55% of the subjects could not recognize the funny point The situation was far much better in T2 Especially, with much more than half of the subjects (70%) scoring 1 in T2, the result showed that the students were good at the level of identify and explanation where the funny point was after the intervention period and this told that some type of linguistic jokes were interesting for the students in terms of double meaning
For joke 5, which used the ambiguity of lexis, 18 over 20 subjects (90%) did not know the answer to the joke before the treatment After the treatment, the result was remarkably changeable with 25% subjects getting the score of 0.5 and 35% gaining
Discussions
3.3.1 Application of the authentic materials: benefits and challenges
The proposed authentic materials were made based on the approach of developing competencies or skills with the analysis of learning needs and situation needs for English humour and jokes They provided the students with in-depth sources for comprehension, appreciation and low-level performance of English jokes, focusing on the content for what makes a joke, types of jokes and context for joke telling from different situations Each unit teaches one type of jokes Linguistic jokes are distributed into classes over three units such as unit one, unit two and unit three, universal jokes go into unit four, cultural jokes in unit five and short funny stories are collected in unit six With such the distribution, students will have a panorama of English jokes and opportunity to put the jokes into practice Figurative language and cultural features could be drawn from these jokes
This kind of materials concurs with Wulf‘s (2010) curriculum on humour competence including both canned jokes and spontaneous conversational humour
However, Wulf‘s (2010) curriculum is quite broad with different types of joke mainly for developing humour competence and knowledge, while the proposed materials of the present study concentrated on developing the ability to interpret humour in English jokes in scope of teaching humour for tour guide students on the area of humour appreciation and performance
In terms of benefits, first of all, there is one very important issue that must be considered when discussing about the authentic materials, namely the way in which the jokes were written by the English people for English people and the ones were actually used in classroom context The jokes were widely used and the most popular for people selected from authentic books and on the internet In fact, when we found that foreign tourists liked jokes about the country where they were visiting but we could not use translated Vietnamese jokes for the TGU students to learn because they were not authentic when being translated and then if TGU students would use these jokes to tell to the tourists then the tourists would not understand because they would not know anything about Vietnamese humorous culture This happened in one class when a student told a joke which she translated from Vietnamese into English but the foreign teacher as a tourist did not understand the joke It can have been that the student‘s English was not good and she repeated until it was made clear but the foreigner had no appreciation Moreover, one result from the interview in the stage of NA released that if we had wrong translation or we invented jokes about the people or country‘s fun foreign tourists would think that was a truth because verbal humour in terms of ethnic humour tends to target at some communities (Davies, 2011)
One more important thing was that when joking with foreign tourists, TGU students had to join in the group and found the identity They needed to be embedded with English jokes and the cultures of the English-speaking people By this way, Vietnamese TGU students could penetrate into the English-speaking communities and do their job well After the materials were verified by the teachers, they were modified with more pieces of cultural jokes and readings about the cultures of the countries whose people customarily visited Viet Nam such as America, The United Kingdom, Australia, China, Canada, etc However, the English jokes were grouped in types and in topics In types, there were linguistic jokes, cultural jokes and reality-based jokes and in topics mostly reality-based jokes were ordered into cluster of tourism, restaurant-hotel, travel, environment, etc (Schmitz, 2002; Fabel,
2014) By this way, TGU students could find it easy to be engaged into English jokes and culture for a remarkable knowledge about humorous language of the real life and be prepared for their ability to tell joke in their future job
When it came to the advantages of using authentic materials, findings released that they were significant both from the obvious pedagogical perspective, and from a psychological one, as they helped students become more confident, once they realized that they could ―survive‖ in a real cultures of the target humorous language
That was true because on the one hand through the phase 1 in the stage of NA findings unveiled a fact that foreign tourists did not like dirty jokes or any jokes about sex or discrimination They liked the jokes about country, people, lifestyle, etc These types of jokes were appropriate to be used in classroom On the other hand, the jokes which were used by the English-speaking people made the TGU students found that they felt like staying among the target language community and being identified themselves in this community They were more assured and satisfied with learning comprehending, appreciating and reciting English jokes
Furthermore, students felt motivated when seeing that they can find the things they need for themselves, and they also felt encouraged to continue reading jokes for pleasure in the respective language and job
One other advantage worth considering is that authentic materials help students kept up with the ―living‖ language of humour No language is stationary and frozen; humour languages are numerous, abundant, changeable and magical Genuine materials introduced the TGU students to text types and language styles, which they could not normally come across in textbooks, helping them acquire more complex knowledge of the language in humour For example, the play on words such as excellent and egg- cellent, sandwich and sand which, etc made the TGU students surprised and laughed
They got amazed when they discovered that pen which is very common as an object for writing, now has another meaning of a living place of pigs
Moreover, authentic materials were selected under the competency-based approach, so they exposed the TGU students to a very large range of activities that were acceptable for developing tour guides‘ capacity of tour guiding such as the skills of telling jokes and amusing people with jokes and joking Last, but not least, these materials may prove to have an intrinsic educational value (Harmer,1983) as they help the students be informed and learn more about that particular culture The TGU students said the materials provided them with many types of joke and culture of joking Hence, the authentic materials satisfied the criteria: suitability, exploitability and readability (Table 1.8) This is a success of the proposed materials
Nevertheless, using this kind of authentic materials could also prove to be not just challenging, but also problematic These materials with authentic jokes could be biased and difficult to understand outside the language community, while the vocabulary they contained might prove to be too much for the students and not quite relevant to their immediate needs, both in terms of vocabulary and in terms of language structures For example, when read the joke ―What is a crocodile‘s favourite game? – Snap‖ the student did not understand and felt bored because they did not know the meaning of the word ―snap‖ When receiving an explanation that snap means the sound of catching prey, students could understand and be amused
However, the problem could be solved with the help of a native speaker in the classroom who provided the meanings of difficult words and the cultural point in the jokes, which created a connection between an L2 joke reader/hearer and the target language writer for a text to be found funny (Raskin, 1985) Thus, if not properly chosen, handled and used, jokescould produce panic among the students and could prove to be de-motivating for the learners faced with highly unfamiliar humorous language Finally, one other aspect worth considering was the fact that using authentic materials in teaching was extremely time consuming, both when it came to preparing it and when it came to actually using it in classroom
Nevertheless, we strongly highlighted that a capacity could be developed resorting to a series of such materials, ranging from cartoon, to pictures, documentaries available on-line, on CDs and on audio containing humorous language which the students undoubtedly came across in everyday life and in their future job
3.3.2 Application of humour competence model
The achievement of the present study is that it has demonstrated thatthe ability to make sense of humour in English jokes can be developed for Vietnamese tour guide students The data in the pretest showed that the number of students who could appreciate jokes was very low But after learning, there was a dramatic change in posttest results The results of post-intervention showed a positive effect in teaching humour by using the proposed authentic materials
Notably, with such effective application of the authentic materials, it is correct to accept the combination of the models of Hay's and Bachman's through the system of competence (Table 1.4) to develop the ability to make sense of humour in English jokes The authentic materials were put into use and constituted achievement The results showed that students could recognize the types of English jokes, understand jokes, feel and tell English jokes to foreign visitors At level 1 (Remembering) TGU students could identify and name the type of humor, at level 2 (Understanding) they could understand and explain why it is humorous, in level 3 they interpret the humour mechanism Different types of comedy and comedy are suitable, so at level
4 they are able to tell comics to the listener
Chapter conclusion
This chapter has presented the results of the data collected and analysed in the two phases of the study, preliminary and intervention A mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods with data collection instruments of questionnaire, tests and interview questions was employed so that the collected data provided a comprehensive picture of the facts The data were described and analysed using the SPSS with the results in the forms of percentage and means of T-test
Needs analysis was conducted to gain insights into what to teach and how to teach the students to access humour and interpret English jokes The demand of humour in tourism, current and requirements of using humour in tour guiding and inadequacy of the target humour knowledge of college students were described and analysed in the form of percentage A set of authentic materials of English jokes was proposed for instruction to overcome the inadequacy of the current situation
The results of the intervention on the EFL tour guide students were selected on students‘ written and oral tests showing a high increase after the instruction as a treatment by using the authentic materials
This is the final part of the thesis which reviews the whole study with the summaries of the main findings, followed by the implication, limitation of the present study and suggestions for further studies.
Recapitulation
The proposed authentic materials which were selected were followed a set of criteria for selection and adaptation for tour guide students, such as the appropriate types and topics of English jokes for using in the English language classroom and tour guiding practice Based on the results from tourists‘ favourite types and topics, the jokes were selected from comic books, internet, newspaper, etc Criteria for jokes selection were set up The jokes were written for English-speaking people
They belonged to the style self-enhancing humour and suitably used for the language teaching in classroom The language, grammar and length were right for learners at pre-intermediate and intermediate level of English The jokes were in the three categories of linguistic, cultural and reality-based ones with such linguistic ambiguities as homophone, morpheme, polysemy, syntax, pragmatic ambiguities as locution, illocution, perlocution, relevance, maxims of quality, quantity, relation and manner, and cultural ambiguities The topics of the jokes were attributed to socio- cultural knowledge with the social world and working world The social world consisted of interpersonal interactions as family, friends, pets, restaurant, bar, hotel, and popular culture as fashion, library, school, social stereotype and entertainment as sports, television and movies The working world encompassed office life and professions Types of the joke focused on one & two-liners, riddles, short funny stories and the best length of the joke was disposed between 100 and 300 words (Wiseman, 2002) These authentic materials were used to enhance the TGU students‘ ability to make sense of humour in English jokes The materials were accompanied by a teacher‘s book and stragegies of teaching including project of task-based activity, role play and problem-solving which were appropriate for the cognitive learning theory and humour
It is clear that there has been a significant reduction in the level of difficulties: ambiguity, meaning of words, structure, word pronunciation, culture, length and context of the jokes between the results of pre tests and post test Although improvement was seen in all three type of humor, reality based jokes were proved the easiest to understand both at the beginning and the end of the intervention while cultural humor was quite difficult to understand originally in spite of a similar positive change in levels of understanding
For ambiguity, meaning of words, structure of the joke, pronunciation of words and the context of the joke, at first the three categories of the jokes were equally difficult to comprehend, but later Reality-based jokes were the easiest to understand, the linguistic jokes were the most understand and cultural jokes were more difficult than reality-based and easier than linguistic jokes For the length of the joke, reality-based jokes were the most difficult for comprehension of the three categories both before and after the intervention though the degree of difficulty could reduce For the cultural features in the jokes, it was cultural joke that stood first in both before and after the intervention
The answer was that the TGU students could recognize, understand and appreciate the humour in English jokes and more than that many of them could recite full joke story successful The following is the achievement of the competencies (Table 1.5)
(1) Not to recognize the linguistic elementsin English joke texts (0 mark): sharply decreased (Joke 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12)
(2) To recognize and understand the humour ambiguities (0.5 mark): highly increased (Jokes 1,3,4,5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12)
(3) To interpret the humour ambiguity (1 mark): highly increased (Jokes 1,3,4,5, 6,
7, 8, 10, 11, 12) Except for Joke 2 being a morphology and Joke 9 being a culture- based which fairly few students got the funny points
(4) To tell a full joke with good pronunciation in appropriate contexts: More than 40%
(5) To tell a full joke with good pronunciation and gesture in appropriate contexts:
(6) To tell a full joke and make people laugh: More than 10%
The total of (4), (5) and (6) was more than 70% with six out of 15 students reached
―very good‖ and ―very funny‖ degrees at Competency No (6)
1.4 Answer to the overarching question
It is eventual to respond the overarching research question ―To what extent do the
EFL tour guide students make sense of humour in English jokes through authentic materials?‖ that all and nearly all the EFL TGU students could recognize, understand and appreciate the humour in English jokes and more than two-thirds of the students could recite full joke stories successfully All of the students could recognize the ambiguities in English jokes, most of them could understand and interprete the humorous points in English jokes and especially they were eager to hear and able to tell English jokes The findings on the measurement of fun for the students‘ joke telling performance showed that the TGU students were able to understand all kinds of jokes and tell jokes Two-thirds of the students could tell full-story jokes with good pronunciation, one-third could tell full-story jokes with good pronunciation and appropriate gestures and two students were the best joke tellers with both appropriate verbal and non-verbal communicative performance
Therefore, the use of authentic materials in the classroom could be judged to be effective The criteria and strategies for syllabus design, joke selection, materials evaluation and teaching methods were appropriately This is the success of the study in exploiting authentic materials for classroom instruction It can be concluded that it was completely possible to teach English jokes for better humour interpretation and recitation
Notably, the achievement to be constituted is that the comprehension of the ambiguities in English jokes was mostly dependable on the linguistic competence and knowledge of society and culture that EFL learners attained The results show that English jokes of both wordplays and reality-based jokes were quite easily comprehended by the students and that the cultural ambiguities were not really obstacles for them because the authentic jokes were selected at the simple level of humour (Obrst, 2012) It was obvious that if the L2 or EFL learners had not been good at language skills, they would not have attended such a course Actually, EFL learners learned the humour in English jokes together with enriching their linguistic and cultural knowledge and enhancing their poetic competence and illocutionary competence as well Moreover, practicing reciting English jokes helped them improve their listening comprehension, make their listening and speaking better and expand their repertoire of English words and culture features Especially, the presence of foreign teachers during the course contributes to the reliability and praciality of the study results The students were very interested in the English jokes through videos and cartoons and could get the funny points of the jokes very quickly The foreign teachers explained the context of the jokes, explained the culture implied in the joke and helped them to read and pronounce the words in puns Findings showed that some students who had good sense of L1 humour did not comprehend L2 humour in pre-test and did not interpret the humour in post test as well as the ones who were competent at the language Therefore, it could be claimed that anyone who has good sense of L1 humour cannot be well-accquainted with L2 humour, but they have to learn when they desire to appreciate and communicate with L2 humour (Bell, 2007).
Implications
The present study used mixed research methods as a contribution to the literature on research methodologies for pragmatic studies It was a design to follow an explanatory sequential approach in which the quantitative methods were emergently sequential with the qualitative ones (Creswell & Clark, 2011) Actually, it was a process in which quantitative findings were firstly extractedfroma large samples and then qualitative ones were done for better addition and preference From this initial exploration, the second approach with qualitative findings was used to develop measures that could be administered to a smaller sample In the planned qualitative approach, interviews and observations data were collected
It is obvious that there are some advantages of using mixed methods in the present study First, it can be seen that by using the both types of research, the strength of each approach can make up for the weakness of the other For example, the quantitative data could not help understand the context or the setting in which the participants behave while qualitative data were weak in generalizing findings to a large group and trending towards bias in interpretations Second, mixed methods provided a more complete and comprehensive understanding of the research problem than either quantitative or qualitative approaches alone Third, the study provided an approach for developing better and more context specific instrument It was this instrument that helped build validity for the measures in tests Finally, in spite of some disadvantages of time consumption and hard work, a comprehensive source of data was taken in case discrepancies could arise in the interpretation of the findings
Thetheoretical framework for developing tour guide students‘ ability to make sense of humour in English jokes accommodates the researcher with a significant practice in the present study On the one hand, the framework is a stacked system which is made up of authentic materials, humour competence and humour appreciation The authentic materials work as a central supplying an empirical source, humour competence is overlapped as level 2 providing means and humour appreciation is as the highest development of the system It addresses that canned English jokes carries the characteristics of verbal humour so for appreciating this kind of humour or its incongruity, it is necessary to catch up not only the knowledge of humour but the competencies needed from humour competence and pragmatic competence for the ability to recognize, comprehend, appreciate the humour and recite or retell the funny English stories On the other hand, it provides a structure for a coherent development
The proposed authentic materials satisfied their needs to be familiar and agreeable with the culture of humour so that they can appreciate it and recite English jokes Clearly, the combination of Raskin (1985)‘s, Hay (2001)‘s humour competence models, and Bachman (1990)‘s pragmatic competence is conceptual and cognitive Furthermore, it is suitable to combine the cognitive theory of learning and cognitive-perceptual process of humour in developing humour comprehension and appreciation, which works as a guideline for the successful teaching method for the authentic materials
Findings from the NA showed that FTs like hearing jokes relating tothe country they are visiting Other NA findings indicatethat TGs and TGU students were afraid of telling jokes to FTs because of the English language and culture obstacles and that most TGU students did not understand, let alone appreciate the humour in English jokes due to the same reasons Therefore, they needed to be recognizable with the incongruity, be familiar and agreeable with the culture of humour so that they can appreciate it To deal with this matter, Fabel‘s (2014) themes of humour were applied for discovering the factual humour themes used in Viet Nam‘s tourism context to enhance the tour guide students‘ ability is expressed through both humour competence and performance The proposed authentic materials satisfied their needs
The present study has made a remarkable contribution to pedagogical implication
First of all, it inspired the TGUs students that it is advantageous to be able to appreciate humour and telling jokes at future workplace That is because with joking and humorous episodes and cultures in the field of tourism the proposed authentic materials were warmly accepted In the second place, the authentic materials were collected and designed following the competency-based offer necessary skills such as reading and listening joke comprehension and telling jokes These are the skills that would be related to the field of work for the TGU students catch up with the real life and easily accommodate with the new working environment (Richard, 2006) Thus, competency-based approach (CBE) was correctly used for selecting such a kind of authentic materials for developing humour competence for TGU students With the approach of competency-based materials, the ability to make sense of humour in English jokes for tour guide students got success and serve humour skill at workplace of tour guiding career In the third part, the proposed authentic materials met the requirement of the standards of teaching humour competence The jokes were authentic but suitable for the students‘ English level and they were the ones that the professional tour guides used at workplace Above all, this proves that jokes can be taught to students.Especially, a course using authentic materials as proposed in the current study is well suited for professional development forthe job of international tour guiding in tourism For instance, it is possible to develop a joke- telling course which helps improve communication and humour skills for tour guide students which follows the qualification of humor in the training curriculum by the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training and the requirement of humor in the capacity of using English by the CEFR (2014) One significant and practical implication that can be grasped is pursuing CLIL standing for Content and Language Integrated Learning (Marsk, 2002: 175) and referring to ―situations where subjects, or parts of subjects, are taught through a foreign language with dual- focused aims, namely the learning of content and the simultaneous learning of a foreign language.‖ Thus, making sense of humor in English jokes can be incorporated into some college subjects such as Tourist Presentation in English and
Cross Cultures in the training curriculum for tour guide students to foster their knowledge of humour styles and cultures that are a source of strength to socio- cultural competence that is much needed for a high-quality workforce for the tourism industry in Vietnam and elsewhere.
Limitations
It can be accepted one limitation on the generalization of the study The 20 TGU students took part in the intervention to develop the ability to make sense of humour in English jokes were at a university Though their outcome was good and confirmed a new perspective for education, this did not involve a wide range of application in the whole country.
Suggestions for further studies
There are two suggestions for further studies One is that there should be a collection of authentic jokes which contain more complex humour such as incongruous genre and incongruous world in the Linguistic humour structure spectrum by Obrst (2012) The other is that it is advisable to have a deep look into the role of socio-cultural competence in joke performance and creation in the workplace of tour guides, international tour guides in particular
In conclusion, it has demonstrated that humor can be trained The study has challenged the traditional conception that sense of humour is in-born and it is impossible to train humour, especially for Vietnamese tour guide students who learn English as a foreign language The study has shown that, through training, the tour guide students who learn English as a foreign language in the study can develop their ability to comprehend humor and recite English jokes Furthermore, being able to make sense of humour in English jokes has helped these students develop their language and communication skills with humour which in turns could help improve their English language learning through English jokes This is a new contribution of the present study Eventually, the study has achieved a real breakthrough in training a highly-skilled workforce for the tourist industry
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APPENDIX 1: SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE FOR TOUR GUIDES
Chào anh/chị, Chúng tôi làm một cuộc điều tra về nhu cầu học truyện cười của sinh viên ngành hướng dẫn du lịch ở các trường cao đẳng và đại học trong tỉnh Khánh Hòa Làm một hướng dẫn viên giỏi không chỉ giỏi ngoại ngữ để giới thiệu danh lam thắng cảnh cho khách du lịch mà còn có thể nói chuyện hài hước để làm cho khách đỡ mệt trong những chuyến đi tham quan Ý kiến cá nhân của anh/chị rất có ý nghĩa và đem đến sự thành công cho cuộc điều tra Xin trân trọng cảm ơn sự giúp đỡ của anh/chị Điền dấu √ vào một trong các câu trả lời anh/chị chọn vào ô trống
Rất nhiều nhiều không nhiều ít không thích
2 Tôi từng kể truyện cười bằng tiếng Anh cho khách du lịch nước ngoài
luôn luôn Thường xuyên thỉnh thoảng hiếm khi không bao giờ
3 Mức độ thành công của tôi khi kể những loại truyện cười sau
Loại truyện cười Mức độ thường xuyên thành công
1 Truyện cười của người Việt cho du khách Việt Nam
2 Truyện cười nước ngoài cho du khách Việt Nam
3 Truyện cười của người Anh cho du khách quốc tế
4 Truyện cười của người Mỹ cho du khách quốc tế
5 Truyện cười của người Việt cho du khách quốc tế bằng tiếng Anh
6 Truyện cười ngắn của người Anh (1 hoặc 2 câu) cho du khách quốc tế
7 Nói những câu đùa về chơi chữ đúng ngữ cảnh với khách quốc té
8 Những câu đùa về giao thoa văn hóa Việt - Anh cho Khách quốc tế
4 Mức độ khó khăn của tôi khi kể truyện cười bằng tiếng Anh
Các nhân tố Mức độ khó khăn
Rất Khó Khó Hơi khó Không khó
5 Mức độ phù hợp của những tình huống khi tôi kể truyện cười bằng tiếng Anh
Tình huống Mức độ phù hợp
1 Khi người hướng dẫn giới thiệu về mình và tổ công tác
2 Trong lúc đang giới thiệu về điểm du lịch
3 Khi du khách ở trên xe giữa hai điểm du lịch
4 Khi du khách nghỉ chân tại nhà hàng hoặc quán café
5 Khi gần kết thúc chuyến đi
6 Chương trình đào tạo hướng dẫn viên du lịch hiện nay có bài giảng về truyện cười bằng tiếng Anh không?
Có Có nhưng chưa học không có
7 Mức độ đồng ý của tôi về những ý kiến sau Ý kiến Mức độ đồng ý
1 Hướng dẫn viên du lịch cần hiểu biết về truyện cười bằng tiếng Anh nhằm phục vụ du khách quốc tế
2 Không thể kể truyện cười của người Việt cho du khách quốc tế
3 Có thể chọn lọc truyện cười của người Việt để kể cho du khách quốc tế
4 Hiểu biết về quốc tịch của du khách là cần thiết để kể truyện cười hoặc nói câu đùa thành công
5 Hiểu biết về nghề nghiệp của du khách là cần thiết để kể truyện cười hoặc nói câu đùa thành công
6 Hiểu biết về độ tuổi của du khách là cần thiết để kể truyện cười hoặc nói câu đùa thành công
7 Hiểu biết về giới tính của du khách là cần thiết để kể truyện cười hoặc nói câu đùa thành công
8 Hiểu biết về văn hóa kể chuyện của du khách là cần thiết để kể truyện cười hoặc nói câu đùa thành công
9 Tính hài hước là cần thiết đối với hướng dẫn viên du lịch
10 Hướng dẫn viên du lịch cần có một khóa bồi dưỡng thêm về các kiến thức cơ bản của truyện cười
8 Tôi thích học loại truyện cười
Loại truyện cười Mức độ thích
Rất thích Thích Hơi thích
1 Truyện cười ngắn của người Anh
2 Truyện cười ngắn của người Mỹ
3 Truyện cười chơi chữ của người Anh
4 Truyện cười ngắn có một hoặc hai câu
5 Những câu đùa về giao thoa văn hóa Việt-Anh
9 Tôi muốn rèn luyện các kỹ năng khi học khóa học về Truyện cười
Kỹ năng Rất nhiều Nhiều Một ít Không muốn
5 Nói và kể truyện cười đúng và hợp lý
We are conducting a survey on the need of humour and jokes for tour guide students at colleges and universities in Khanh Hoa province Your personal opinion is very meaningful and brings about success to the survey Thank you very much for your help
Please put √ in the box () that best indicates your answer with the question
Very much Much Not much A little Do not like
2 I ever tell jokes in English to foreign tourists
Always Usually Sometimes Rarely Never
3 My success frequency when telling jokes:
Types of jokes Success frequency
Always Usually Sometimes Rarely Never
1 Vietnamese jokes for Vietnamese tourists
2 Foreign jokes for Vietnamese tourists
3 British jokes for foreign tourists
4 American jokes for foreign tourists
5 Vietnamese jokes for foreign tourists in English
6 English short jokes (one-or-two liners) for foreign tourists
7 Make jokes about contextual play with foreign tourists
8 English-Vietnamese cross-culture jokes for foreign tourists
4 My difficulty in telling jokes in English
Very difficult Difficult Slightly Difficult Not difficult at all
5 Suitable situations when I tell jokes in English
Very suitable Suitable Slightly suitable
1 When the instructor introduces himself and his team
3 When visitors are on the bus between two tourist destinations
4 When vistors have a rest at a restaurant or café
5 By the end of the tour
6 Do you have a program of learning English jokes?
7 My agreement on the following comments
Very agree Agree Slightly agree
1 Tour guides need to know about jokes in English to serve foreign tourists
2 It is imposible to tell Vietnamese jokes to foreign tourists
3 It is possible to select Vietnamese jokes to tell to foreign tourists
4 It is necessary to know the nationality of tourists to tell good jokes
5 It is necessary to know the occupation of tourists to tell jokes
6 It is necessary to know the age of tourists to tell jokes
7 It is necessary to know the gender of tourists is to tell jokes
8 It is necessary to know the steriostyle of tourists to tell jokes
9 Humor is necessary for the tour guiding job
10 Tour guides need a course on basic knowledge of jokes
8 I like to learn these types of joke
Types of jokes Degree of liking
Very much Much Alittle Not at all
4 Short jokes with one or two sentences
5 English-Vietnamese cross culture jokes
`9 I want to improve these when I attend a joke-telling course
Skills Very much Much A little Not at all
APPENDIX 2: SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE FOR TOURISTS
We would like you to help us by answering the following questions concerning teaching jokes and joking for tourguiding students This survey is conducted to better understand the target needs and learning needs We are interested in your personal opinion
Please give your answers sincerely as only this will guarantee the success of the investigation Thank you very much for your help
Please put √ in the box (□) that best indicates your answer with the question
4 How much do you like jokes?
□Very much □Much □ Not much □Little □None
5 Have you ever heard jokes from tour guides during the tours?
□ Always □ Usually □ Sometimes □ Rarely □ never
6 How much do you like doing these activities during the tour?
Activities very much much a little not at all
6 Hearing funny stories from tour guide
7 How much do you like hearing these types of jokes?
Type of jokes very much much a little Not at all
5 One-and two-liner jokes
6 Joking on the cross cultures
8 How much do you like hearing these topics of jokes?
Topics of jokes very much much a little Not at all
9 How much appropriateness of these situations is for the jokes that you want to hear from a tour guide?
Situations Very appropriate Appropriate Slightly appropriate
1 When the tourguide introduces himself
2 At the attractions when the tourguide is presenting
4 When you are taking a short rest at the coffee shop
5 By the end of the tour
APPENDIX 3: SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE FOR TEACHERS
We would like you to help us by answering the following questions concerning teaching jokes and joking for tourguiding students We are interested in your personal opinion Please give your answers sincerely as only this will guarantee the success of the investigation Thank you very much for your help
Please put √ in the box () that best indicates your answer with the question
1 How much do you like jokes?
Very much Much Not much Little
2 Have you ever used jokes in your English language teaching classes?
3 If so, what type of joke have you ever used in your teaching? (maybe more than one choice for this question)
Long funny storiesshort funny stories Puns one-and two-liners funny riddles Others (specify): ………
4 Are your students interested in the jokes?
not at all not really so-so quite a lot
5 Have you ever taught English jokes for your tourism students?
6 Is the joke ever taught in the training curriculum for tourguiding students at your college /university?
Yes, already Yes, but not popular Yes, but no available material No, never
7 How long do you think a course of learning jokes and joking should be?
One credit two credits three credits four credits Others (specify):………
8 How much do you agree with these statements?
Statements strongly disagree disagree agree strongly agree
1 Tourguiding students need to have the humour sense to serve international tourists
2 English jokes are a potential source of making humour in tourism
3 Tourguiding students need to learn jokes to serve international tourists
4 There should be a course to teach jokes for tourguiding students
5 The course should be compulsory
6 The course should be selective
7 Students at pre-intermediate English level can learn jokes
8 Students at any level of English can learn jokes
9 Jokes should be learnt as a means of communication
10 Learning jokes helps enhance speaking
11 Learning jokes helps enhance listening
12 Learning jokes helps enhance reading
13 Learning jokes helps enhance writing
14 Learning jokes helps enhance humour sense
15 Awareness of joking culture is necessary
9 How much should this type of jokes be taught in the curriculum?
Type of jokes very much much a little not at all
5 One-and two-liner jokes
6 Joking on the cross cultures
10 How much difficulty of these will your students meet when learning jokes in English?
Very difficult difficult Slightly difficult not difficult at all
11 How much of the following do the students need when learning jokes?
Knowledge and skills very much Much a little not at all
APPENDIX 4: SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE FOR STUDENTS
Chào bạn, Chúng tôi làm một cuộc điều tra về nhu cầu học truyện cười của sinh viên ngành hướng dẫn du lịch ở các trường cao đẳng và đại học trong tỉnh Khánh Hòa Làm một hướng dẫn viên giỏi không chỉ giỏi ngoại ngữ để giới thiệu danh lam thắng cảnh cho khách du lịch mà còn có thể nói chuyện hài hước để làm cho khách đỡ mệt trong những chuyến đi tham quan Ý kiến cá nhân của bạn rất có ý nghĩa và đem đến sự thành công cho cuộc điều tra
Xin trân trọng cảm ơn sự giúp đỡ của bạn Điền dấu √ vào một trong các câu trả lời bạn chọn vào ô trống
Rất nhiều nhiều ít không thích
2 Tôi từng kể truyện cười bằng tiếng Anh cho khách du lịch nước ngoài
luôn luôn Thường xuyên thỉnh thoảng hiếm khi không bao giờ
3 Mức độ thành công của tôi khi kể những loại truyện cười sau
Loại truyện cười Mức độ thường xuyên thành công
1 Truyện cười của người Việt cho du khách Việt Nam
2 Truyện cười nước ngoài cho du khách Việt Nam
3 Truyện cười của người Anh cho du khách quốc tế
4 Truyện cười của người Mỹ cho du khách quốc tế
5 Truyện cười của người Việt cho du khách quốc tế bằng tiếng Anh
6 Truyện cười ngắn của người Anh (1 hoặc 2 câu) cho du khách quốc tế
7 Nói những câu đùa về chơi chữ đúng ngữ cảnh với khách quốc té
8 Những câu đùa về giao thoa văn hóa Việt - Anh cho Khách quốc tế
4 Mức độ khó khăn của tôi khi kể truyện cười bằng tiếng Anh
Nhân tố Mức độ khó khăn
Rất Khó Khó Hơi khó Không khó
5 Chương trình đào tạo hướng dẫn viên du lịch hiện nay có bài giảng về truyện cười bằng tiếng Anh không?
Có Có nhưng chưa học không có
6 Tôi nghĩ rằng nghề hướng dẫn viên cần được học để hiểu sâu về truyện cười bằng tiếng Anh nhằm phục vụ khách quốc tế
Rất không đồng ý không đồng ý đồng ý rất đồng ý
7 Tôi thích học loại truyện cười
Loại truyện cười Mức độ thích
Rất thích thích Hơi thích Không thích
1 Truyện cười ngắn của người Anh
2 Truyện cười ngắn của người Mỹ
3 Truyện cười chơi chữ của người Anh
4 Truyện cười ngắn có một hoặc hai câu
5 Những câu đùa về giao thoa văn hóa Việt-Anh
8 Tôi muốn rèn luyện các kỹ năng khi học khóa học về truyện cười
Kỹ năng Rất nhiều Nhiều Một ít Không muốn
5 Cách nói và kể truyện cười đúng và hợp lý
We are conducting a survey on the need ofhumour and jokes for tour guide studentsat colleges and universities in Khanh Hoa province Your personal opinion is very meaningful and brings about success to the survey Thank you very much for your help
Please put √ in the box () that best indicates your answer with the question
Very much Much Not much A little Do not like
2 I ever tell jokes in English to foreign tourists
Always Usually Sometimes Rarely Never
3 My success frequency when telling jokes:
Types of jokes Success frequency
Always Usually Sometimes Rarely Never
1 Vietnamese jokes for Vietnamese tourists
2 Foreign jokes for Vietnamese tourists
3 British jokes for foreign tourists
4 American jokes for foreign tourists
6 English short jokes (one-or-two liners) for foreign tourists
7 Make jokes about contextual play with foreign tourists
8 English-Vietnamese cross-culture jokes for foreign tourists
4 My difficulty in telling jokes in English
Very difficult Difficult Slightly Difficult Not difficult at all
5 Suitable situations when I tell jokes in English
Very suitable Suitable Slightly suitable
1 When the instructor introduces himself and his team
3 When visitors are on the bus between two tourist destinations
4 When vistors have a rest at a restaurant or café
5 By the end of the tour
6 Do you have a program of learning English jokes?
7 I like to learn these types of joke
Types of jokes Degree of liking
Very much Much Alittle Not at all
4 Short jokes with one or two sentences
5 English-Vietnamese cross culture jokes
8 I want to improve these when I attenda joke-telling course
Skills Very much Much A little Not at all