Play in EAP

Do you play in your daily life? What says “playtime” to you?

According to WordPress, it’s bloganuary, when bloggers are provided with little prompts to get their creative juices flowing. Oddly enough the one above really did make me think about aspects of EAP that are often neglected – play and humour. It’s not something most teachers beginning their EAP career associate with the field and more often you hear teachers describe the content of EAP as boring and dull – hardly a jokey affair.

When I started my teaching career I taught for a summer in a private language school, working on two-week holiday courses. By the end of that time I felt I’d spent the time just playing party games to entertain the students. I wasn’t sure anyone had really learned anything. That’s not to say these courses are not important and I’ve done a few myself to enjoy immersion in other languages while on holiday. After that first experience, I had a short stint for the same school teaching First Certificate exam preparation. For me, this was better. It felt purposeful and there was a goal. Teaching academic English was even better as it was needs driven so intensely purposeful.

It was only when I started to work with my mentor, then friend and writing colleague, Sue Argent, that I learned EAP could be fun. She has a wicked but subtle sense of humour that she brought into play in her classrooms and especially her teaching materials. In discussing this recently with Sue, I came to realise that some aspects of humour don’t travel well through time and would now be considered inappropriate. Nevertheless play and humour are still important, for example as Professor Arlene Archer pointed out in her plenary presentation for the recent BALEAP PIM on Multimodality.

In multimodal designs for learning in diverse communities, it is important to create less regulated spaces for learning (Archer 2014). These spaces can be physical or virtual, where students can experiment with a range of genres and modes, including humour and irony. The freedom to tell their own stories and make jokes supports students who may have been marginalised to find a voice. A quick surf of Google Scholar came up with the two references below, which look at humour from the needs of more diverse language learning communities or language learners in school settings. I’m not aware of any research carried out in specific EAP contexts.

I found play and humour great ways of connecting with shy students and encouraging everyone to contribute. I might start a class with a short warmer that involved playing with writing. The game of Consequences, where each person writes a sentence in response to a prompt and passes it to the next player, creates some interesting mini narratives. The prompts can just as easily be EAP-related, e.g. to construct the steps in a genre such as abstracts. Constructing oral paragraphs responding to a purpose (thesis) statement generates the general to specific paragraph structure as each student has to recite the developing paragraph and add another detail. Whole class writing with the teacher as scribe, who sometimes makes deliberate mistakes that have to be noticed and corrected, is also a good practice activity.

In terms of materials, I liked to create and use materials that made me laugh so I could share my sense of humour with students. I was delighted to come across the following pair of sentences in Stephen Pinker’s The Language Instinct

Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.

which I used to examine the relationship between morphological form and sentence function; or the following pair which I used to show the importance of position in sentences.

The teacher destroyed the mobile phone.
The mobile phone destroyed the teacher.

In the EAP materials page of this blog I’ve shared a wonderful spoof article on The displacement of workplace teaspoons, which appeared in the British Medical Journal in 2005 and attracted lots of humourous comments – proving that scientists also have a sense of humour.

For EAP, humour has to lead to something purposeful, which supports the learning outcomes of a lesson. It’s not simply for entertainment to enliven dull lessons but a means of engaging all students in their learning and making it memorable.

References

Archer, Arlene (2014). Manuscript Prepared For: Archer, A. 2014. Multimodal designs for learning in contexts of diversity. Designs for learning. 7, 2. 8 – 26. Retrieved 2.1.24 from Researchgate.net.

Reddington, Elizabeth (2015). Teachers College, Columbia University Working Papers in TESOL & Applied Linguistics, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 22-38 Humor and Play in Language Classroom Interaction: A Review of the Literature. Retrieved 2.1.24 https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/SALT/article/view/1271/336