Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 2; March 2000
A Mixed Bag
A Texan Joke ( sent in by Paul Davis, Durham University)
A Swiss tourist is driving round Texas and stops to ask two rednecks for directions:
"Parlez-vous francais?"
Blank response.
" Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"
Blank response.
" Parla italiano?"
Blank response. The Swiss guy drives off.
One of the locals turns to the other :
"Wow, three languages! Maybe we should learn another language."
And the other:
" Didn't do him much good, eh?"
The tense system in EFL Applied Linguistic Discourse (by a person resurfacing from an MA course)
An overview: this is what is going to be discussed is bla bla bla….…
What I am now saying is bla, bla*, bla bla … and could you please listen.
To recap the main points: what I have expounded is as follows: 1.bla..bla 2. Bla…bla ..3. bla..bla
In conclusion: what I have done is to have said bla bla bla…. the last 40 minutes is bla,bla,bla
*as Professor Widdowfitt said in his seminal 1981 paper- see references below.
Finding a hand grenade
( this joke was sent in to SHARE 15 Two policemen found three hand grenades and decided to take them back to the police station. A keen observer
( told by a colleague from the Canary Islands, Spain, during a joke telling evening at the IATEFL conference on March 29th in Dublin, Eire )
She met him for the first time at a party. They spent that night together. Next morning she looked at him quizzically and said:
A CIA joke.
( a colleague with an accent from the North Americas told this one at the same IATEFL Conference joke evening)
It was at the height of the cold war and the CIA realised they needed to get many more spies into the
USSR. They decided that the new generation of spies needed to be reared for the job from the cradle.
They picked this particular baby as part of their pilot scheme. They had him adopted by a Russian refugee family, he went to Russian language kindergarten and then on to Russian medium elementary school.
He was given a fully Russian childhood and adolescence.
The great day came when he met the people it had been arranged for him to stay with in
Moscow. Everybody was sitting round the dinner table and this five year old kid said: Two Galician Jokes ( Galego)
these were sent in by Vincent Iannacone who says that in Mexico people like to make fun of migrants from North West Spain. Why do Galegos have round windows in their houses? Why are Galego universities to be found at the bottom of the sea?
" What if one explodes?" asks one.
" No problem," says the other, " We'll say we only found two"
" I don't know if I'm right, but….you must be a doctor.."
" Well, yes, I am. How did you guess…"
" You washed your hands before….. and you washed your hands after …"
" You're amazingly observant ".
" I think I know your medical speciality… you must be an anaesthetist".
" Yes, right, how come you guessed?"
" Well, …. I didn't feel anything!"
" You're an American, aren't you?"
The spy's heart sank: they'd sussed him already.
" No, I'm not, I'm Russian born and bred."
" A black Russian?"
Well, obviously, to let the sun in.
Because, deep down, Galegos are not that stupid!
