41st ELT Blog Carnival: Teaching with Humor

Humor is more than just a funny face!

Welcome to the 41st ELT Blog Carnival! For quite some time I have had an obsession with using humor in the class. I find the more my students laugh, the more they learn! It seems I am not alone as this carnival has ten other teachers eager to share how they use humor in the classroom.

My hope is that you go through these blog posts and the descriptions intrigue you enough to click on the blog posts and get inspiration on how to get your students to laugh a little and relax enough to really learn.

Enjoy :-)

 1. Nick has an amazing collection of comedic sketches on YouTube. His contribution to the blog carnival is a list of DOs and DON'Ts when using these clips in the classroom. He uses several examples on different occasions these clips fit well in class and I am sure you'll be excited about using some of them in your classroom. Read more: Using "COMEDY FOR ELT" clips

2. David has a great blog to get you laughing that comes from his lessons in a can series of blog posts. It contains several links with jokes you can use including a slide with 22 jokes! You can have your students listen to these be read, or you can use them as reading activities. As David says, "it can be very funny and it is a good way to lighten up the day/lesson!"  Read more of the jokes for yourself at his blog post with: Funny Jokes

3. Alina has created a super cute blog filled with comics. Each of these comics contains a joke that uses the grammar form her students are learning. What a great way to use visuals to help students really comprehend jokes! I love how she was able to find so many jokes that fit her grammar needs perfectly. Interested? You can read it for yourself at her blog: Grammar With Comix


4. Here is a great oldie by Ivan Sokolov! It was originally published by the Bulgarian English Teachers' Association IAFTEL in 2001! It is a really well researched article on how and why humor is effective in the class. Be sure to read it to get a better idea of how and more importantly why to use Humor in the EFL Classroom

5. Vicki Hollet has created some lovely and informative videos for English Language Learners. This video is a short and humorous example of how to handle a phone call if you are busy. If you are looking for an example to use in class this is perfect! The grammar is simple, the humor is obvious, and the pronunciation is clear. Be sure to watch the video How to Handle Calls When You're Busy


6. I am a huge fan of using short videos in class! The Alltac blog has a great lesson using a funny video about students taking a make-up exam. In addition to the video being funny there are two pages of teachers notes. One page gives you ideas of how to incorporate the lesson, and the other page gives you materials for an activity. See the video and read more at the Alltac Blog.

7. Emily Richardson 's blog covers a plethora of ways to get students laughing in class. From fake mustaches, jokes, stories or just general vocabulary Emily has plenty of ways you can get your students giggling. You can read the rest of her blog post titled "Laughter is the best medicine." (Be sure you check out the cheer-leading video at the bottom of her post! It makes me smile every time!)

8. Roberta wrote a great post for World Laughter day back in May. She goes through the reasons humor is great in class (I agree with every single one of them!), as well as some sites that you can use to find jokes. Finally she goes through a simple way to use jokes in the class that could be adapted to work with so many different levels. World Laughter Day 

9. Raquel has a FANTASTIC lesson that's funny and practical! She uses clips from Friends as a starting point for discussing stress and other medical symptoms. In addition to clips, she also has QR codes set up for infographics. Raquel assures me that this lesson went over really well with her students, and I can see why! See for yourself: Explaining Symptoms

10. How does summarizing a movie make students laugh? When they do it in 5 seconds! It wouldn't be a blog carnival without a contribution from Larry Ferlazzo. I get a lot of my English game ideas from Ellen; Larry seems to get a lot of his from Jimmy Fallon! This is a quick post where he points out that one of the more recent games Jimmy Fallon played with his guests could be used in class. Read his post (and see a video) and I am sure you'll find a way to get your students laughing over this game:  Jimmy Fallon's Game

11. Finally, originally I was going to make a post on some jokes I use for reading comprehension. However, my summer became much busier than I expected. Instead I offer a fantastic doodling activity to do with students. It is a great way to practice adjectives, relative clauses, complex sentences etc. The exciting part about this game is students are ALWAYS interested. They are usually laughing half the class! I love when they have fun and learn! See for yourself: Doodling for Complex Sentences

I hope you enjoyed reading this carnival as much as I enjoyed putting it together. As always I encourage you to share the carnival with other teachers you feel may interested. As a special incentive we have FOUR funny items that the carnival contributors have put up for raffle:

• There are THREE Digital Prizes to be won

• From Emily you have the chance to receive a copy of her Pirate Joke book! 
• David's goodie is a PowerPoint with audio filled with Funny Stories, the printables that go with it, worksheets that go with the lesson and a Joke of The Day PowerPoint.
• Vicki has offered the worksheets that go with the amusing video on how to handle phone calls when you're busy.
• In addition to these great digital prizes, to show everyone you appreciate the humor found in English, I will send this, "You've cat to be kitten be right meow" iPhone 4 case you can proudly display. (Note as this will be mailed, only people with U.S. addresses can win. If the winner of the three digital prizes does NOT have a U.S. address, another winner for the phone case will be selected).

The contest will run for one week and then the winner will be announced. Good luck!
a Rafflecopter giveaway
 

Giggle Poetry: Book Review

I am a huge fan of humor in the classroom (reminder there's still 5 days to submit your blog for the ELT Blog Carnival on humor). I think that getting students to laugh lowers their inhibitions and makes them feel more comfortable. In addition to making class a happier place to be it also allows students to participate more.

I am also a fan of poetry. I like the dream flag project because it encourages students to participate in more figurative thinking, not worry so much about rules, and get interested in other parts of English (other than just short stories and novels).

Giggle Poetry Reading Lessons is a great book for teachers of hesitant learners (especially readers). It introduces new vocabulary in a fun way, and encourages fluency by having students present their poems in front of the class. Many of the poems also encourage motions and movement, making this a TPR expereince.

Approximately the first 10% of the book is helping teachers (or parents) learn how to navigate the book. It goes over studies (why they developed the book), methods (how they encourage the book to be used in class) and examples. You can (clearly) ignore this part if you just want the poems, but the content is pretty solid and helps you understand how you may best use the poems in your class.

Keep them smiling while reading!

Then, we have thirty-four different poems. Quite a few of these I like enough to use with my high school students! Several I didn't like at all (but I can see how students would), and the vast majority I found perfect for middle school or elementary students.

To give you an idea of the topics of poems here are some of the titles: Dirty Socks, What I found in my Desk, Bad Hair Day Rap, Ish!, Someone's Toes Are in My Nose, and How to Torture your Teacher.

The poems are usually 1-2 pages and divided into stanzas. Next to the poem there is often direction as to the desired motions or intonations (e.g. "Act stern. Wage your finger.") While the poems are fairly basic in terms of vocabulary there are some cases where rather advanced words are used. If you are dealing with EFL students, you may like to scaffold more than the book does. An alternative is to substitute advanced words with cognates or more basic synonyms. Most of the poems are written with a rhyme or meter that makes memorizing and reading them easier than a standard text.

After each poem the book provides a lesson plan. As with all prefabricated lesson plans, I suggest you make many adaptations to best suit your class. These ideas area great start! The objective for each poem;s lesson plan is more or less the same, "Objective: The student will read text fluenty, with attention to pace and expression and with a high level of accuracy, as a means of comprehending the text."

Then it walks you through the five steps they suggest you follow:

1. First activate background knowledge. The book provides sample questions to ask students to get them thinking of the topic. In an EFL environment some visuals would probably be helpful too!
2. Skim/Scan. Usually they advise students to underline any words they may don-t know without looking at the context or situation. There are other great skimming and scanning activities you could use here.
3. Modeled Reading. Usually this is set up for the teacher to read (and it gives guidance on how it should be read), but you could do this in many other ways as well.
4. Guided Reading. Students are given the chance to look at vocabulary, inference,  and practice reading as a class (echo reading and choral reading) or in pairs (buddy reading)
5. Finally students are given time to read on their own during Independent Reading.
6. The last step is to have a student present (the book emphasizes to encourage them heavilily and focus on their successes rather than failures).

Personally, I feel that after the third poem this lesson plan structure is BORING! It has a great structure, but repeating it again and again isn't very fun to read. Don't be afraid to vary it for your class. Use the skeleton but adapt the activities, or do your own thing!

After the poems, at the end of the book, there are rubrics and suggested assessment methods. Again, feel free to adapt these as needed to keep your class interesting and best suit your students needs. This is by far the best book I have read all year, and I suggest you look into purchasing it yourself. To read more about Giggle Poetry you can check out their website.

Using ‘COMEDY FOR ELT’ Clips

This is a guest blog written by Nick Michelioudakis and it will be included as part of the August ELT Blog carnival on humor. You can read more about the blog carnival and how to participate here (11 more days to submit your blog!). This post covers how English Language Teachers can use different YouTube videos to get students more interested in English. I am sure you'll enjoy it and hopefully get a laugh or two from the videos shown here!

Why use these clips?

This material is not meant to be used like ordinary coursebook material. There is no progression from easier extracts to more difficult ones, nor has there been an attempt to focus on micro-skills in any systematic way.  The main purpose of these sketches is to motivate students.  Having used extracts from comedies for a number of years, I found them by far the most interesting material for students and I was amazed to find that although virtually everything else has at some time or another been put to use in the EFL classroom, this was not the case with radio and TV comedies. 

What can I use this material for?

The fact that most of the sketches are quite short suggests that they can be used as ‘fillers’.  Naturally, this is not to say that they cannot be used to achieve other aims.  For example they can be used to...

... introduce some topic (‘Comedy for ELT – Relationships 1’)

... demonstrate activities (‘Comedy for ELT – The ‘Yes-No’ Game’).

... practise topic vocabulary (‘Comedy for ELT – Technology’)

... practise functions (‘Comedyfor ELT – Small Talk’)

However, most of the dialogues are so funny that very often all the introduction the teacher needs to make is: ‘Listen to this!’

In what way is this material different?

Compared to what one normally finds in ELT coursebooks, these excerpts are generally more difficult for a number of reasons:

• They are authentic – i.e. not originally meant for the ELT classroom.
• They are scripted, so there is none of the redundancy and repetition which makes real-life speaking somewhat easier to understand.
• The delivery is usually very quick.
• The accents are either ‘strange/funny’ (deliberately) foreign-sounding or exaggerated.
• There are puns and ‘double-entendes’ which make real-time processing harder.
• There is often play with register, or other devices which again make the listener’s task harder – just as even in the L1, it is often difficult to ‘get the joke’, even if one understand all the ‘words’.

DOs

It follows from the above, that the teacher’s role is to help the students as much as possible, to make it easier for them to enjoy these extracts.  This can be done by:

• Setting the context: explaining what the situation is and who the participants are.
• Supporting students with unknown vocabulary / background knowledge / cultural elements etc.
• Keeping the tasks easy – easier than the students’ level would suggest. 

Precisely because the material is fun, it may be that some students (of the ‘unless-it-hurts-it-can’t-be-good’ school of thought) may feel that it is a waste of time.  For this reason it is a good idea for the teacher to:

• ‘Sell’ the idea to the students, stressing that if they can understand these dialogues they will have no problem with the – relatively easier – ones in the exams, and
• ‘Link’ the dialogues to the rest of the lesson, so that they are integrated and there is a sense of purpose and continuity (that is the reason why the ‘Theme’ is mentioned in the notes accompanying the clip).

 DON’Ts

• Don’t give students the punch-line; it spoils the sketch for them as it deprives them of the pleasure of understanding it themselves.
• Don’t play extracts which require too much explanation.
• Unless you know your class / private student really well, don’t take unnecessary risks with ‘dangerous / taboo’ topics (e.g. sex, politics, religion).
• Don’t treat this material like the listening tasks you normally come across in coursebooks.  Make it clear to students that you see it as an ‘extra’, a ‘treat’.  If they expect it to be special, this will act as a self-fulfilling expectation.  Remember: Anything can be ‘schooled’!.

Task 1

Normally in listening activities it is a good idea to get students to listen to the audio/video clip more than once, with the normal sequence being first listening for gist and then for detail. In the case of these sketches the first task is normally easier than one would expect as focusing too much on it would detract from the students’ enjoyment.  Typical activities are T/F Qs, Complete the sentence, Ordering or Straightforward open-ended Qs.

Task 2

In my experience students want to be able to understand the dialogues as fully as possible, which is why in most cases the second task involves them working with the script (e.g. typically filling-in gaps combined with adding, deleting or changing words). 

[NB: The words which are blanked out are not random; in most cases words are deleted so that students have to understand the missing words to ‘get the joke’ or in order to focus their attention on some important preposition, collocation etc. Similarly, when a word is substituted for another, in the vast majority it is a near synonym, so that students will not have to look up the meaning of the original word].

Repetition

For the students to both enjoy the extracts and derive the maximum benefit from them, I believe it is a good idea to listen to them more than once.  In fact (unlike other material) the less challenging their task becomes through repeated listening, the more students enjoy the dialogues as they can appreciate the humour more – their increased confidence enables them to catch things they had previously missed! 

Follow up

As the main aim of the listening activities is to help students to appreciate and enjoy the dialogues, I have not included any follow-up language or skills work so as not to spoil the whole experience for them.  However, there are a number of things teachers can do after these listening sessions.  Here are some ideas:

• Role play:  students may like a particular extract so much, they may want to act it out, or, better still, record their dialogue on audio or even video tape (‘Constable Savage’).
• Parallel writing:  students may write a similar dialogue on the same or a related theme (‘Two Recipes’).
• Extension:  where a dialogue is part of a story, students may want to continue it, or simply write a paragraph ‘predicting’ what is going to happen next (‘Letters H – Miss P.’) They can then listen to the rest of the sketch/episode to check their predictions.
• Noticing:  unless the script-writers have deliberately tried to create a funny effect, the language used perfectly mimics colloquial speech. Indeed, some of the best scripts are not scripted (‘Death’). Therefore it makes sense to occasionally ask students to go through the scripts simply underlining phrases.  [NB: Instead of focusing on unknown–extremely rare/low- frequency items, it is best if they look instead for expressions/collocations which they can easily understand, but which they would not have used themselves.] 

Last words

This is the main idea: You ‘sacrifice’ some of your precious contact time in the hope that the motivational effect will more than make up for it! In a sense, it is a calculated ‘gamble’; there is always a trade-off between quantity and quality. Here the bet is that the amount of exposure the students get, will more than make up for the opportunity cost. If the ‘gamble’ works, you may find that the students who spent 15 minutes in class watching a Rowan Atkinson clip, will then go on to spend another 5 hours at home watching every similar clip they can find!  To find out why just watch some of the clips yourself! :)

 About the Author

Nick Michelioudakis (B. Econ., Dip. RSA, MSc [TEFL]) is an Academic Consultant with LEH (the representatives of the Pearson PTE G Exams in Greece).  He has worked as an ELT teacher, examiner and trainer for both teachers and Oral Examiners. His love of comedy led him to start the ‘Comedy for ELT’ project on YouTube. He has written many articles on Methodology, while others from the ‘Psychology and ELT’ series have appeared in many countries. He thinks of himself as a ‘front-line teacher’ interested in one-to-one teaching and student motivation as well as Social and Evolutionary Psychology.  When he is not struggling with students, he likes to spend his time in a swimming pool or playing chess.  For his articles or handouts, you can visit his site at  www.michelioudakis.org.