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
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.