Teaching irony in the Spanish/L2 classrooman empirical study with intermediate and advanced level students

  1. Martín-Gascón, Beatriz
Revista:
Porta Linguarum: revista internacional de didáctica de las lenguas extranjeras

ISSN: 1697-7467

Ano de publicación: 2023

Número: 39

Páxinas: 213-230

Tipo: Artigo

DOI: 10.30827/PORTALIN.VI39.24084 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openDialnet editor

Outras publicacións en: Porta Linguarum: revista internacional de didáctica de las lenguas extranjeras

Resumo

This article presents an empirical study on the implementation in the Spanish/L2 classroom of a cognitive-based pedagogical material to teach irony building from previous research on irony detection in Spanish and English tweets (Author 1, 2019, in press). Participants were 87 intermediate and 82 advanced students from a North American university. Data were collected during a 75-minute classroom session following a pretest/posttest design to measure irony production and identification. A linguistic background and language use questionnaire was also administered prior to instruction. Quantitative data derived from the irony recognition tests were analysed through a scoring system. Mixed data from the irony production tests were codified to pinpoint learners’ ways of expressing irony using an analysis scheme based on Ruiz de Mendoza’s (2017) twofold category of irony. The results revealed a significant improvement after the intervention for students from the two proficiency levels. Advanced students were significantly better in the production task; however, no significant difference was found between the two groups in the irony recognition tasks. Our findings outline the impact and importance of explicitly teaching irony –a rather neglected aspect heretofore– already at lower levels to avoid misunderstandings in the L2 and enhance learners’ intercultural awareness and communicative competence.

Referencias bibliográficas

  • Alvarado Ortega, M.B. (2018). The pragmatics of irony in the L2 Spanish classroom. In D. Dumitrescu, & P.L. Andueza (Eds.), L2 Spanish pragmatics: From research to teaching (pp. 169–190). Routledge.
  • Alvarado Ortega, M.B., & Ruiz Gurillo, L (2013). Humor, ironía y géneros textuales. Universidad de Alicante.
  • Attardo, S. (1994). Linguistic theories of humor. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Attardo, S. (2000). Irony as relevant inappropriateness. Journal of pragmatics, 32(6), 793-826.
  • Attardo, S. (Ed.). (2017). The Routledge handbook of language and humor. Taylor & Francis.
  • Ayçiçeği-Dinn, A., Şişman-Bal, S., & Caldwell-Harris, C. L. (2018). Are jokes funnier in one’s native language? Humor, 31(1), 5-37.
  • Bell, N. (2006). Interactional adjustments in humorous intercultural communication. Intercultural Pragmatics, 3(1), 1-28.
  • Bell, N. D. (2009). Learning about and through humor in the second language classroom. Language Teaching Research, 13(3), 241-258.
  • Bouton, L. (1999). Developing nonnative speaker skills in interpreting conversational implicatures in English. Culture in second language teaching and learning, 30(1), 47-70.
  • Cervantes Instititute. (2006). Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes. Madrid: Biblioteca nueva. Retriveed from http://cvc.cervantes.es/ensenanza/biblioteca_ele/plan_curricular/.
  • Chen, X., & Dewaele, J. M. (2019). The relationship between English proficiency and humour appreciation among English L1 users and Chinese L2 users of English. Applied Linguistics Review, 10(4), 653-676.
  • Clark, H. H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge university press.
  • Clark, H. H., & Gerrig, R. J. (1984). On the pretense theory of irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 113(1), 121–126. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.113.1.121
  • Cook, G. (2000). Language play, language learning. Oxford University Press.
  • Cuza, A., & Frank, J. (2015). On the role of experience and age-related effects: Evidence from the Spanish CP. Second Language Research, 31(1), 3-28.
  • Davies, C.E. (2003). How English learners joke with native speakers: an interactional sociolinguistic perspective on humor as collaborative discourse across cultures. Journal of Pragmatics, 35, 1361-85.
  • Davis, C.B., Glantz, M., & Novak, D.R. (2016). “You Can't Run Your SUV on Cute. Let's Go!”: Internet Memes as Delegitimizing Discourse. Environmental Communication, 10(1), 62-83.
  • Dean, J. (2019). Sorted for memes and gifs: Visual media and everyday digital politics. Political Studies Review, 17(3), 255-266.
  • Deneire, M. (1995). Humor and foreign language teaching. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 8(3), 285-98.
  • Dörnyei, Z. (2000). Motivation in action: Towards a process‐oriented conceptualisation of student motivation. British journal of educational psychology, 70(4), 519-538.
  • Ghosh, D., & Muresan, S. (2018, June). “With 1 Follower I Must Be AWESOME: P.” Exploring the role of irony markers in irony recognition. In Twelfth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.
  • Gibbs Jr, R. W., & O'Brien, J. (1991). Psychological aspects of irony understanding. Journal of pragmatics, 16(6), 523-530.
  • Grice, P. (1989). Studies in the way of words. Harvard University Press.
  • Haiman, J. (1998). Talk is cheap: Sarcasm, alienation, and the evolution of language. Oxford University Press on Demand.
  • Jobert, M., & Sorlin, S. (Eds.). (2018). The pragmatics of irony and banter (Vol. 30). John Benjamins Publishing Company.
  • Kreuz, R. J. (2000). The production and processing of verbal irony. Metaphor and Symbol, 15(1-2), 99-107.
  • Kim, J., & Lantolf, J. P. (2018). Developing conceptual understanding of sarcasm in L2 English through explicit instruction. Language Teaching Research, 22(2), 208-229.
  • Linares-Bernabeu, E. (2017). “¿Y dónde está la gracia? El humor en el aula de ELE.” Foro de profesores de E/LE 13, 20.
  • Lozano Palacios, I. (2021). A scenario-based approach to irony. Structure, meaning and function. [Unpublished PhD Thesis]. Universidad de la Rioja, Logroño, Spain.
  • Lovink, G., & Tuters, M. (2018). Memes and the reactionary totemism of the theft of joy. non. copyriot. com.
  • Martín-Gascón, B. (2019). A cognitive modeling approach on ironical phraseology in Twitter. In G. Corpas & R. Mitkov (Eds.), Computational and Corpus-Based Phraseology (pp. 299-314). Springer, Cham.
  • Martín-Gascón, B. (In press). Irony in American-English tweets. A cognitive and phraseological analysis. John Benjamins.
  • Muschard, J. (1999) Jokes and their relation to relevance and cognition or can relevance theory account for the appreciation of jokes? Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 47(1) 12-23.
  • Muecke, D. C. (1978). Irony markers. Poetics, 7(4), 363-375.
  • Ritchie, D. (2005). Frame-shifting in humor and irony. Metaphor and Symbol, 20(4), 275-294.
  • Ruiz de Mendoza, F.J. (2017). Cognitive modeling and irony. In H. Colson & A. Athanasiadou (Eds.), Irony in language use and communication (pp. 179-200). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Ruiz de Mendoza, F.J. (2019). Figurative language: relations and constraints. In J. Barnden & A. Gargett (Eds.), Producing figurative expression. John Benjamins.
  • Ruiz de Mendoza, F.J. (2020). Understanding figures of speech: dependency relations and organizational patterns. Language & Communication, 71, 16–38.
  • Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, F.J., & Lozano-Palacio, I. (2019). Unraveling irony: From linguistics to literary criticism and back. Cognitive Semantics, 5(1), 147-173.
  • Ruiz Gurillo, L., & Ortega, M.B.A. (Eds.). (2013). Irony and humor: from pragmatics to discourse (Vol. 231). John Benjamins Publishing.
  • Ruiz Gurillo, L., & Padilla García, X. (Eds.) (2009). Dime cómo ironizas y te diré quién eres. Peter Lang.
  • Schmitz, J.R. (2002). Humor as a pedagogical tool in foreign language and translation courses. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 15(1), 89-113.
  • Shively, R. L., Menke, M. R., & Manzón-Omundson, S. M. (2008). Perception of irony by L2 learners of Spanish. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 16(2), 101-132.
  • Singh, A., Blanco, E., & Jin, W. (2019, June). Incorporating emoji descriptions improves tweet classification. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers) (pp. 2096-2101).
  • Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1981). Irony and the use-mention distinction. Philosophy, 3, 143-184.
  • Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1998). The mapping between the mental and the public lexicon. In P. Carruthers & J. Boucher (Eds.), Language and thought: Interdisciplinary themes (pp. 184-20). Cambridge University Press.
  • Thomson, RM. (2003). Satire, Irony, and Humour. In C.J. Mews, C.J. Nederman & R.M. Thomson (Eds.), Essays in honour of John O Ward, Turnhout. W. William of Malmesbury, rhetoric and renewal in the Latin west (pp. 115-127).
  • Tuters, M. (2018). LARPing & liberal tears. Irony, belief and idiocy in the deep vernacular web. In M. Fielitz & N. Thurston (Eds.), Post-digital cultures of the far right (pp. 37-48). Transcript-Verlag.
  • Van Hee, C., Lefever, E., & Hoste, V. (2016, May). Exploring the realization of irony in Twitter data. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16) (pp. 1794-1799).
  • Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (1992). On verbal irony. Lingua, 87(1), 53-76.
  • Zhang, S., Zhang, X., Chan, J., & Rosso, P. (2019). Irony detection via sentiment-based transfer learning. Information Processing & Management, 56(5), 1633-1644.