The 'Humour' element in engineering lectures across cultures : An approach to pragmatic annotation
- Submitting institution
-
Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 11595562
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
-
10.1163/9789004321342_016
- Book title
- Corpus Linguistics on the Move : Exploring and Understanding English through Corpora
- Publisher
- Brill
- ISBN
- 9789004308077
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- July
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The research furthers understanding of the ways in which a key discourse practice within global higher education (use of humour in lectures) can be identified and understood, cross-culturally, from a lexico-grammatical perspective. Humour has the potential to impact on engagement and information absorption, and the findings are therefore relevant to materials and curriculum designers, and to lecturers and students moving between cultural contexts.
The method, described as 'pragmatic annotation', provides a novel and systematic means of identifying the distribution, duration and specific function of humour episodes in lectures. The dataset (c. half a million words) is unprecedented in size for such detailed manual annotation. The research demonstrates humour as an important discourse practice occurring frequently and consistently throughout all lectures, and that laughter responses vary depending on the country and humour type employed. The findings have implications for addressing communicative issues of cultural sensitivity, culture shock, engagement, and associated learning effectiveness. This is of increasing significance in a climate where HE institutions worldwide are moving to English-medium instruction, and where the rapid shift to online learning has focused attention on student engagement.
This single-authored output is a chapter in an edited collection comprising fourteen contributions by leading scholars in the field of corpus linguistics. Alsop has undertaken empirical research into the use of humour in the Engineering Lecture Corpus (ELC), a dataset collected in collaboration with Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), and Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand through funding from a British Council PMI2 Research Cooperation grant. The results have been disseminated internationally, for example through the 9th Inter-Varietal Applied Corpus Studies International Biennial Conference 2018 in Malta.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
