9. Building rapport and a sense of communal identity through play in a second language classroom

Abstract

Many teachers would recognize that a certain amount of laughter and play in a classroom is one of the signs of a socially cohesive and contented group of learners. However, on the face of it, language play in a multinational second language classroom would seem to be highly constrained by an apparent lack of common cultural reference points and, at the lower end of the proficiency spectrum, by the linguistic abilities of the learners.This paper features an investigation into language play consisting of a teacher and two low-proficiency adult learners from different professional fields and nationalities, enrolled on an intensive Business English course. The analysis is informed by Goffman's concept of frame, by Bakhtin's ideas about the heteroglossic and dialogical nature of language, and by Bauman and Briggs's notion of recontextualization. It shows how the learners build a common pool of prior talk and reference points, alluding to them humorously. The data consists of a series of short episodes which together trace the development of one such shared reference point. Over two days, the learners transform an incident which highlights their shortcomings in the language into a celebratory resource that they playfully use to build rapport and to help in the construction of a shared sense of identity and culture. I argue in this paper that the language play found in the featured data is very similar in kind to that in native speaker interactions.

Language Play with Formulas in an EFL Classroom

“…These observations support claims by other researchers who assert that, besides fostering the development of linguistic and pragmatic abilities, language play may also result in significant affective benefits. It can increase language learners' motivation (Broner and Tarone 2001;Waring 2013), enhance community formation (Carter 2004;Cekaite 2018;Cekaite and Aronsson 2005;Hann 2017;Laursen and Kolstrup 2018), and contribute to communicative confidence and an affectively charged atmosphere (Bushnell 2009;Pomerantz and Bell 2011;Tarone 2000). In Section 3, a few examples were presented where learners of this study applied sequences that they played with such as oh my god or don't touch the Selina hair.…”

“…Moreover, language play can generate a sense of community among a group of language learners. Hann (2017) found that language play built rapport among the adult L2 students and contributed to their sense of communal identity.…”

“…Research in the field of applied linguistics has revealed various roles of language play in facilitating language learning (e.g., Bell 2005Bell , 2012Cekaite 2018;Cho and Kim 2018;Cook 2000;Hann 2017;Laursen and Kolstrup 2018;Reddington and Waring 2015). Several studies suggested that play can provide opportunities for noticing and encoding form as language users pay increased attention to language structures such as morphemes, phonemes, and lexemes (Bell and Skalicky 2018;Bushnell 2009;Cekaite and Aronsson 2005;Forman 2011).…”