Human-machine communication has emerged as a new relational context of education and should become a priority for instructional scholarship in the coming years. With artificial intelligence and robots offering personalized instruction, teachers' roles may shift toward overseers who design and select machine-led instruction, monitor student…

This paper draws on the KINSA project (The Communicative Situation of Immigrants at Swedish Workplaces), which aimed to identify communicative factors that have a positive impact on the integration of second language speakers in the workplace and in their immediate work team. The focus here is on humour and swearing as strategies for doing…

This article examines the relevance of humor to student engagement in outdoor education. A sociocultural framework is applied to this examination, based on a view of learning as constructed, cognitive, embodied, and affective. A set of affordances of outdoor education as a contextually situated learning activity is identified along with related…

This qualitative study aimed to explore how infants share and experience friendships and examine the role of infant caregivers in social and friendship experiences among infants. The data were collected through classroom observation over a semester. Findings yielded complex and rich social relationships that both infant friends and caregivers…

This article considers previously ignored aspects of verbal communication, humor and laughter, as critical components of social interaction within group discussions. Drawing on data from focus groups, Robinson uses a feminist perspective to explore how mothers living in areas of poverty in Liverpool, UK, use humor and laughter to discuss their…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine the experiences of older adults with dementia while they were in long-term care and while they were in a summer-camp setting. Participant observation and interviews took place in both settings to gain an understanding of the experiences of seven residents of the long-term care facility. In the…

This analysis looks at the humorous use of second-speaker repeats to initiate conversational repair. It is proposed that consideration of joking repeats forces reanalysis of the organization of conversational repair. The preference analysis theory is rejected in favor of a locally governed analysis of conversational repair in which participants…

In the past few years researchers have begun to show an interest in humour and language play as it relates to second language learning (SLL). Tarone (2000) has suggested that L2 language play may be facilitative of SLL, in particular by developing sociolinguistic competence, as learners experiment with L2 voices; and by destabilizing the…

This study investigates young children's humourous activity as a form of play and considers the implications on their cognitive development and learning. The study was conducted in an infant room of a university based group child care center and multiple qualitative data collection methods were used. The findings of this study suggest that during…