Speech Errors and Joke Construction in the Routine Language Teaching
Giampaolo Poletto, Hungary
Giampaolo Poletto is Doctoral Candidate at the Doctoral School in Linguistics of the University of, Pécs, Hungary, where he collaborates with the Italian Department and teaches Italian and English in high schools. His fields of interest are Applied Linguistics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis, the Linguistics of Humor. He has participated in and contributed to international conferences and meetings in the aforesaid areas. His research focuses on the role and function of humor in the framework of language teaching and learning. He has articles and reviews published both on paper and online journals. Email: g.poletto@yahoo.it
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Introduction
Speech errors as markers of deviation and hints at a revision of the norm
Examples for didactic applications
The situated context
The joke
The joke in the language teaching practice
References
I have attempted to sketch a comprehensible and structured view of the joke as an option, which concerns the teacher-student discursive interactions in a language classroom, in the context of the routine language teaching practice. In the course of any period, to any learner orally performing in her/his L2 may happen to make a speech error. As a potential source of unintended verbal humor, it can trigger the participated and goal-oriented construction of a joke, where the speech error works as a connector. The joke turns out to be a communicative move, strategically enacted by the teacher, in order to tackle and solve the learner’s impairment, not to the detriment of her/his face. It does not carry any informative load nor convey any intended message.
Didactically speaking, the joke is an explanation, which is supplied in an indirect and unusual form to the learner, with the purpose to make her/him profitably come to terms with an error, by fostering the negotiation of meaning. Cognitively speaking, the joke obtains it by resorting to an abductive kind of logic and a divergent kind of thinking. In this way, it better outlines the frame of the vent of utterances any (L2) learner is to be assumed to be potentially able to produce, when speaking in public in the language classroom. A joke is a reminder of the fact that any of such outputs entails the use of a degree of creativity, whatever felicitously or not, from the point of view of the grammatical accuracy and of the communicative effectiveness.
Not all of them contain linguistic items which can be turned into connectors, but the teacher is anyway to consider their unpredictable and varied nature, to keep their exploitation as possible, to be ready when they are uttered. Finally, the joke reinforces and falls within the domain of a conversational- and learner-oriented kind of class management. In this perspective, speech errors, which are so volatile and need to be manually transcribed just after they are uttered, in order to have a documentary and scientifically appreciable value in the field of the linguistics of humor, can become valid reference points in a didactic perspective.
As a matter of fact, there are some which are connected to typical impairments due to structural differences between two languages. They are bound to be recursive. Once they have been collected and organically grouped, they could be intentionally used by the teacher to focus on some kinds of problems, which would otherwise remain undiscovered, and have jokes already prepared to face them. An example: the ability to do something is analytically displayed through three expressions in Italian, whereas one single verbal construct vehiculates the three different meanings in Hungarian. The triad 1) Non so leggere! , 2) Non riesco a leggere! , 3) Non posso leggere! uniformly translates into Hungarian as Nem tudok olvasni!. Despite the very different and relevant implicatures which each has, namely:
- I am illiterate.
- I do not understand what is written!
- I cannot make it out due to a temporary sight impairment, or because I am blind.
So, during a lesson to a group of advanced beginners, when the teacher’s handwriting is not understood, the learner makes a transfer from her/his own L1 and says in Italian: Non so leggere!
Translation: I cannot read!
Implicature: I am illiterate!
The implicature is correctly associated to the wrong utterance, which should obtain 2, instead. The student’s utterance prompts the teacher’s humorous reply:
Brava/o! E sei già al liceo!
[Great! And you are a high school student already!].
The joke is:
A: Non so leggere!
B: Brava/o! E sei già al liceo!
[A: I cannot read!
B: Great! And you are a high school student already!].
After its exploitation, which has worked as an attention getter and a twist into relief, the explanation of the didactic elements involved starts. Admittedly, the reasoning on the above topic is not an easy task to accomplish, in that it requires the full attention and concentration of the pupils, and there is not a different opportunity to thoroughly examine it, in that textbooks obviously cannot focus on it, given the specific relevance which has for learners whose mother tongue is Hungarian or has similar characteristics in terms of unique translation of the above triad.
Once that their didactic potentialities have been emphasized, nevertheless a few words should be spent about the technical difficulty in collecting speech errors, because they are unpredictable. To guarantee that they are authentic and hold a scientifically acceptable documentary value, they should be recorded in the very moment in which they are uttered. Technically and logically speaking, this is almost not viable. If I have a microphone connected to a mini tape recorder, I should: need a highly sensitive and technologically advanced one, ready to intercept and record sounds with different patterns and intensity, coming from any part of the class; keep it with me but far from the learners’ sight, thus cheat to them, because any attempt to bring them to notice that I am interested in their erroneous production in their L2 would definitely undermine its spontaneity, if not our rapport; keep it always on, so that it is ready slightly before the emission by the learner; keep it on and record entire lessons, which will be then thoroughly listened, in order to excerpt samples of interest; keep it on, and hope to be ready to finalize the work with the elaboration of a suitable joke, without giving the impression that I am just looking for that.
Let us now add to the last part of the previous paragraph, where we have focused on an introductory reasoning on how a speech error can trigger unintended humor, function as a connector and prompt the construction of a face-restoring joke, in communicative terms, which also works as a meaning-negotiation device, in didactic terms. All of these issues are illustrated later. For the designed and below detailed didactic activity, we have drawn on recursive speech errors, which stem from unadvertedly wrongly stored data on a given lexical item or on a given expression. When learners are solicited, they may use a structure which they do not master properly, due to lack of information on its total signification. The example under scrutiny here was the use of to be able to with reference to the ability or not to do or say or feel something, etc. Needless to say that each and every teacher can operate such a selection and construct a didactic activity on the basis of his/her own experience, on empirically observing that some items or speech units or structures are repeatedly and precisely misused, that is to say speech errors are identical and refer to the same items, speech units or structures.
Hungarian foreign learners of Italian translate it as Posso / Non posso, because they make a transfer from their L1 Nem tudok , on the one side, and have not been instructed on the Italian triad Posso, Riesco a, So, which translates three different meanings of to be able to. Needless to say that neither Hungarian teachers of Italian nor grammar textbooks are to be blamed. It easily passes unnoticed to the former, although they may know it, because of the more relevant issues and topics which they are requested to focus on, in the teaching practice and on account of the compulsory syllabus. The latter cannot account for it, because it is a language specific matter. In other words, they cannot either know or be assumed to know whether a certain phrasal construct is more hardly viable for a Russian learner rather than for an Arabian one, given a degree of impedence brought about by translinguistically conflicting structures in the source and in the target language. Humor and a native teacher may offer a different - and not exhaustive, though - perspective, as follows.
The above triad entails the exploitation of a differing degree of ability, which, when expressed in the negative form, ranges from a statement of permanent inability to an acknowledgement of a transitory element of obstruction to the exertion of a given ability, due to the agents’ involved. In the case of a teacher writing something on a board, his/her handwriting may represent the obstructive element, which induces a literate learner to be unable to read or fully understand, for example. Another characteristic of the triad is that it refers to a whole lot of everyday experienced situations. There are a lot of things which can or cannot be done or made daily. That helps shift the focus from abstract to concrete. A triple such as Non so capire, Non riesco a capire, Non posso capire [I cannot understand, I am not able to understand, I do not succeed in understanding] implies the use of a verb like capire, which has a strong element of abstractness. In short, this element makes it more difficult to explain the learners the difference, that is in which situation to use which of the three.
Chiudere/Aprire una porta [To close/open a door], instead, brings about the evident clash between the permanent and the transitory inability. Evidence of the former arouses humor, in that it is almost impossible that an average young person is not able to close/open an ordinary door, and a statement of self-inability would ridicule him/her, even when the statement comes after a fact, for example, when a learner closes behind himself/herself the door of a room which can just be opened from the inside. If the learner does it and it is unintentional, that arouses laughter. In a drill with the description of everyday situations which are familiar to the learners and entail the use of the three verbal expressions of ability, the learner, even working in pairs or in groups, has the task to work out three different statements of inability and motivate them, once that the class has been duly instructed about the different implicatures and meanings of the triple. The focus is on awareness.
The contrast between the easily accomplishable action and the hardly immaginable acknowledged inability leads the learners to construct a motivation which is going to sound funny, when they use non so. They are going to use the first singular person, so as to personify somebody who is so incapable and provide a processable reason for his/her incapability. The subject is unable to perform the suggested actions, which are displayed in the form of a verb in the inifitive form between brackets, just after the sentence. Such a subject is assumed to be a healthy average person of the same age as the learners; no supernatural powers or magic interventions or disabilities are thus allowed to be evoked or given for granted. The situations are summed up in the following, provisional and extensible or reducible list of ten. More, less or different situations are liable to be used or quoted. Eventually, after a set of given actions, learners can be allowed to work out some on their own, and even propose them to the other groups into which the class has been parted.
- Vuoi uscire di casa. La porta è chiusa.(aprire)
[You want to go out of your house.The door is closed. (to open)]
- Hai ricevuto una lettera da un amico/un’amica e gli/le vuoi rispondere. (scrivere)
[You have got a letter from a friend and want to reply. (to write]
- Sei a cena con gli amici e viene servito il gulyás. (mangiare)
[You are having dinner with your friends and you served the gulyás. (to eat]
- Ti stai preparando per andare a una festa. Mancano solo le scarpe e sei pronto/a. (mettere)
[You are dressing up for a party. Just the shoes and you are ready. (to put on]
- Hai finito la spesa in un supermercato e sei alla cassa. (pagare)
[You have finished your shopping in a supermarket and you are at the cash. (to pay]
- È successo qualcosa e vuoi informare qualcuno con il telefonino. (mandare/chiamare)
[Something has happened and you want to inform someone with your mobile. (to send/call)]
- Sei in fila al cinema/in discoteca/a teatro. Vuoi entrare. (comprare)
[You are queuing at the movies/disco/theatre. You want to go in. (to buy]
- L’autobus è arrivato alla tua fermata. Ti alzi. (scendere)
[The bus has arrived at your bus stop. You stand up. (to go off)]
- Sei al bagno e hai finito. (tirare lo sciacquone)
[You are in a toilet and you have finished. (to flush the pan]
- Sei a piedi, assieme ad altre persone, da una parte della strada. Il semaforo diventa verde (attraversare)
[You are on foot, together with other people, on one side of a road. The traffic light gets green. (to cross]
In a language classroom there are Hungarian foreign language learners of Italian and an Italian native teacher. The framework is the routine language teaching practice. Broadly speaking, the class is viewed as an interactive and cooperative setting, where dynamics of socialization are enacted and learning takes place through joint and participated goal-oriented activities. Discourse interactions occur in relation to a model which differs from the traditional Initiate-Respond-Evaluate and takes into account the relevance of conversation.
One day the teacher has a lesson with an advanced group. One student utters the following sentence:
- C'è un insegnante sotto la poltrona.
[There’s a teacher under the the armchair.]
She intends to draw the teacher’s attention on something which she has just noticed, therefore she lets him know. The sentence is grammatically correct and its perlocutionary effect is made clear, in that the teacher is alerted and understands that he has to turn and check what has happened or is going on. Nevertheless, 1. presents a speech error, which relates to what in psycholinguistics is called ‘spreading activation’. It is a model of word retrieval, which implies the coexistence in the lexicon of semantic and phonemic links. Sound-based phenomena induce to postulate the existence of a phonemic element which is active, or operative, during the lexical access. In the case of 1., it is inse, which is a phonemic element of both insegnante [teacher], word of more frequent use in the school environment, and insetto [insect], which is the word which the student intended to say. The latter is far less frequently used than the former, but it is not unknown to such an advanced student, ie it is part of the lexicon which she and her mates have been learning during their years of Italian language studies.
The intended sentence sounds like this:
- C'è un insetto sotto la poltrona.
[There’s an insect/a beetle under the armchair.]
In the case of 2., with no further contextual information, the process of utterance disambiguation runs smooth, because any potential ambiguity of the speech units has been closed or removed. The text is serious and well-formed. In 1, at a first parsing of the text, such a process is interrupted, because insegnante results incongruous. It is abductively accepted and collocated in a provisional mental space – such as the blend – where remains until the incongruity is solved. The principle or criterion which is activated in the search for the solution is of a cratyilistic kind: one form – one meaning. It entails that there is a motivated and specific relation between what a word means and the form in which it is phonemically displayed.
There is an identity between the phonemic and semantic mental outcome of insegnante, and a different one for insetto. This is different from what the abitrary relation between the mental representation of a sign and the sound of a sign. The search for a solution is a process which is carried out at a conscious level. Speaker or hearer are aware of the manifestation of a problem, which is to be solved. In the case of 1. just the hearer is, because the student has not realized what she has really said and has repeated the utterance. Among the possible solutions, the teacher opts for the completion and the switch from a serious to a humorous mode of communication.
After backtracking and newly parsing the text, he has inferentially got to 2., and replies to 1:
- Deve essere piccolo.
[He (the teacher) must be small.]
The two-turn conversational exchange, ie what the student and the teacher have said, therefore is:
- A: C'è un insegnante sotto la poltrona.
B: Deve essere piccolo.
[A: There’s a teacher under the the armchair.
B: He must be small.]
A defunctionalized and playful use of language is inferred in 3., whose goal is to reduce the abductively accepted absurdity of 1. and bridge towards a new interpretation, through a dialogical exchange in a humorous mode of communication, as below detailed. 4. lies on the above cratyilistic correspondence , which is fictitious and goal-oriented. The purpose is to indirectly let the student know that in the form in which she has conveyed her message there is a fault, an incongruence. The solution proposed by the teacher is: to accept 1., complete it by adding 3, so that the resulting dialogical exchange, 4., may lead lead the student to consciously parse 1. and switch to 2.
Let me now briefly show that 4. is a joke, which has been functionally built up in order to solve the problem in 1., at a conscious level, cooperatively, together with the speaker. The question whether it is a successful or a failed joke is not under scrutiny and not relevant. The issue at stake is the detectability of the joke structural elements and of their internal necessary bounds. The model is a narratively tripartite sequence. The requisites are the existence of a connector and a disjunctor, collocated in the proper order and displaying a recognizable and meaningful mutual relation. The word which can work as connector is insegnante, whereas piccolo can work as a disjunctor. The former inferentially recalls insetto, therefore happens to hold and undercovers two different senses. As a matter of fact, piccolo refers to both previous terms, too; for this reason it is a potential connector. Given the contextual clues provided in 1., it cannot refer to insegnante, though.
The utterance entails the implicature that a teacher, as a human adult being of a certain size and build, whatever lying, sitting or standing, can be contained in the space outlined under an armchair. This is very unlikely and immediately discarded as to the possibility of its occurrence. Such a hypothesis stands until the word piccolo interrupts the process of disambiguation and hints at the need for parsing the text again.
Piccolo induces a frame-shifting process, in search for the animated being or the object whose size fits the given spatial collocation. Insegnante in 1. is not metaphorically but inferentially tying to insetto - as in 2. - which is an animated being [-human] effectively so small - or piccolo - to satisfy the given spatial requirements. The frame/script opposition is thus assumed to fall within the real/unreal category. The two senses coexist, are conveyed through insegnante, which connects to insetto, and manifest through piccolo, which is the disjunctor. In the end, whatever successful or not, 4. has the requisites to be considered a joke.
Now the question shifts to the profitability of such a joke construction strategy in an educational environment. Two basic issues outline my perspective. The first is that the joke in itself does not carry any informational load and its only goal is to be funny, thus there is no need to search for or discuss about any intended - and serious - message which is eventually conveyed through it. The second issue is that its profitability exclusively attains a kind of joke which builds on the above situational circumstances, as I am going to detail below. Joke 4. has been functionally elaborated due to the emergence of a possible connector in the course of the accomplishment of a lesson. The word insegnante is an error speech marker and can work as a connector in the construct of a joke, which represents an option. It represents an option in the disposal of the teacher to face and solve a problem, of linguistic or extralinguistic nature, which manifests during the discursive interactions in a language classroom.
Insegnante reveals the existence of a speech impairment in the L2 learner’s performance. The teacher uses the joke as a problem-solving device, that is as if it were a communication strategy. The connector has been provided by the learner, through 1.; the teacher finds out the appropriate disjunctor, displayed in 3.; the final outcome is 4., a well-formed joke. The teacher intends the learner to realize, acknowledge, come to terms with and fix the error. S/He chooses to found a joke on that error, on the incongruous presence of insegnante in 1., so that the learner can have the possibility to focus on it, and eventually operates a self-correction.
Such opportunities of prompting jokes as 1. are unpredictable and spontaneous, which entails that they may as well as may not occur. On the basis of my teaching experience, then, just empirically and broadly speaking, if they occur, this usually happens once in a lesson, rarely more than once. Due to the degree of ambiguity latent in every utterance, the pervasiveness of humor, the social nature of an educational environment as the classroom, such opportunities can manifest in any moment in any lesson where there is a discursive teacher-student and student-student interaction. Nevertheless, the teacher is not to take advantage of that. It is assumed that such forms of conscious humor, as the joke, which originate out of imperfect performances, fall within the framework of a serious discourse. This is to be maintained if the jokes intend to have a specific doublefold didactic use. The first is that they are elaborated and performed during an ordinary lesson, where the teacher may provide occasions for relaxing the atmosphere and ease the management of the class. In the educational framework of routine language teaching, let me remind that I maintain as non-recommendable cracking jokes for mere entertainment, to take and keep the floor, by either teachers or learners.
The second goal refers to the possibility of concretely focusing on linguistic and/or extralinguistic items, which, as I am going to explain, does not contrast with the aforesaid absence of an intended message in a joke. A joke has not the goal of conveying an intended message, which does not exclude that it may as well have one, according to the interlocutors’ utterance understanding process. As a hearer, I can parse the text again and even find out a serious meaning or content, which happens, for instance in the educational environment our paper refers to. Nevertheless, this neither alters the given postulate nor is so relevant to the ongoing discussion of the joke construction and use. In case, it sheds light on a collateral aspect, which is the reconduction of the joke within the serious discourse of a lesson.
Speech errors by learners disclose an ambiguity, which is intercepted by the interlocutor, ie the teacher, who avails of the option to turn them into connectors of a joke. Speech errors reveal that a linguistic item, whatever a word, an expression, a phrasal construct, is somehow not correctly stored in the learners’ lexicon. Furthermore, they provide an opportunity for an immediate fixation, at least in the short-term memory. The wrong item has been chosen as the most immediately and effortlessly available and accessible, and has been unintentionally uttered, as the learner is not aware that it is wrong. Speech errors arouse laughter in the hearer just when two opposing semantic frames are undercovered to have been overlapped by means of the enunciation of a script partly or totally belonging to both, vehiculated through the connector. Admittedly, the incongruity which is immediately detected when the speech error is uttered is humorous only if the two frames have something in common, logically speaking, which is recognized and acknowledged. They share a part of their total significance, which entails that one or more of the possible expansions of the original stimulus lead to their conception.
Speech error as sources of unintended humor are valuable because potentially any learner, regardless of age, proficiency, gender, culture, can produce them. They occur much more frequently than intended humorous acts, regardless of the issue or topic under exam and of the phase of the period. They work as connectors and solving mechanism triggers. They allow to more accurately calibrate the cognitive load and guide the effort, which one or all of the learners in a class are to make, in order to revise and better scaffold one item stored in their lexicon. They render it possible in reason of the limited but exact insight which they offer on the way the lexicon is accessed. They assume the execution of a performance by the learner, which encounters the instances relevant to outer factors, namely confronting with a native speaker in the language classroom, and inner factors - such as the affective filter, the degree of self-esteem, anxiety, motivation. One of the tasks of a language teacher is to account for them and attempt to felicituously tackle the aforesaid negative perception, which is the result of a combination of outer and inner factors generally not so homogeneous and positive as that of the portrayed proficient learner. One of the skills the teacher can use to back it is the sensitiveness to face. For this reason, the joint construction of a joke out of a speech error has a face-restoring purpose and effect.
Then, the joke serves to quickly bridge from an unconscious to a conscious level, where the learner is called to parse again his/her text and monitor its well-formedness with additional information, which should enable him/her to become aware of the difference between what he/she intended to say and what he/she has effectively said (Chomsky, 1968). The joke works as an oriented form of digression and a communicative, strategic move. In a social context, in discursive terms, its nature is diverting, but it is here subordinated to orientedness. An ongoing speech is motivatedly and temporarily interrupted. A different topic is targeted, for the time necessary to emphasize and reflect on a speech error marker, reframe it, shift back to the previous status of the communication.
Conversations cannot be expected to be a linear chain of turns, when a native and a non-native are talking to each other in the latter’s L2. On the contrary, they include requests for clarifications or for acknowledgement of understanding, paraphrases, foreignizings, simplifications, and so on. They all reveal the emergence of language impairments and are enacted as problem-solving devices. There is a difference between them and speech errors used as connectors in improvised jokes. The former are consciously enacted by the L2 speaker and work as attention getters, whose perlocutionary effect is to have the native interlocutor to help. The latter are unconsciously uttered by the L2 speaker and it is the L1 speaker’s task to operationalize them as solving-mechanism triggers.
In this sense, in the end, jokes foster such a process as the negotiation of meaning, or the search for mutual understanding in a conversational intercourse, which is the goal of the enactment of communication strategies. If the interactants are a native and a non-native speaker, negotiation of meaning is even more necessary. It implies a linguistic and extralinguistic confrontation, a transfer of both grammatical and pragmatic knowledge, skills and competence. Needless to say that any person has acquired and developed a pragmatic competence in their L1, which provides them with tools and resources spendible in communicational contexts, as well as in situations of impairment, as when talking in their L2 to a native speaker. In a communicative-oriented language class, the native teacher and the L2 learner come close to reproduce that natural situation, for istance through role-play activities which can reduce the given degree of artificiality of the educational setting. Even closer can lead a speech error, because it is spontaneous and unpredictable, and enable the interlocutors to immediately focus on and provide a solution to the impairment regardless of the setting, by means of their own communicative competence. The joke out of a speech error well suits to encompass, display and complete the whole of the above interactional process as if the conversation were going on in a public social context.
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