A Study On Humorous Classroom Discourse In College English Class Based On Multimodal Conversation Analysis

As an effective teaching method,apart from easing the classroom atmosphere and creating a harmonious relationship,humorous classroom discourse between teachers and students can increase the opportunities of language learning and language output for students.At present,the academic researches on humor classroom discourse between teachers and students mainly focused on teachers or students,paid more attention to the explicit processes from a single modality of language.Therefore,from the perspective of multimodality,this study adopts the conversation analysis method,utilizes six representative audio-visual speaking lessons from the10 th National Foreign Language Teaching Contest(College English Group)as examples to uncover the generation mechanism of humorous classroom discourse between teachers and students.The following three research questions are explored.1.How is humorous classroom discourse between teachers and students initiated and constructed in college English class?2.How are different modalities collaborated and how do the collaboration of multimodalities facilitate the construction of humorous classroom discourse in college English class?3.What kind of the production mechanism of the humorous classroom discourse between teachers and students can be constructed in college English class?In order to ensure the objectivity of the research,this study adopts the research method of qualitative and quantitative analysis,and with the help of multimodal video annotation software Elan 6.4 and speech analysis software Praat,the conclusions can be drawn as follows:Firstly,the humorous classroom discourse was mainly initiated by the teacher rather than the students.In the process of constructing humorous classroom discourse,it mainly originated from the construction of teacher-student conversational structures,and the change of teacher-student prosody while nonverbal modalities were used to maximize the humorous effect.Secondly,the patterns of collaborating multimodalities were divided into five types,including the coexistence of six modalities(language + gaze + gesture + head movement + facial expression + prosody),four modalities(language + gaze + facial expression + prosody;prosody+ gesture + head movement + facial expression;language + gesture + facial expression +prosody;language + gesture + head movement + prosody),three modalities(language + gaze +prosody),two modalities(language + prosody)and the existence of one modality(language).By collaborating modalities,two main pragmatic functions were observed: improving the classroom atmosphere and promoting students’ learningFinally,the production mechanism of humorous classroom discourse comprised two processes: the generation and transmission of humor classroom discourse,and three links: the appearance of verbal modalities,the collaboration of nonverbal modalities,and the initiation and reception of humorous classroom discourse between the teacher and students.The coordination of multimodalities was essential in the process of initiating humor,and students’ reactions involved both immediate and subsequent responses following the generation of humorous classroom discourse in the classroom.In a word,the humorous classroom discourse between teachers and students is a bidirectional interactive process.This thesis constructed the generation mechanism of humorous classroom discourse between teachers and students in college English class,and put forward corresponding teaching strategies based on the research results,which could provide reference value for the practice of humorous classroom discourse between teachers and students in college English class in a certain sense.At the present stage,this study still has some limitations in the aspects of text transcription and analysis and the number of research objects,which can be further improved and explored in future studies.