This article strives to open a window on 'eco-humour', an umbrella term for diverse forms of humour targeting ecological and environmental issues. It encourages readers to consider eco-humour as a valuable, pedagogical toolkit for environmental education and communication. To this aim, eco-humour is, first, put into perspective of humour…

As digital technologies increase in their capacity to generate, display, and disseminate visual materials via spaces like social media, there is a need for pedagogical practices that support meaning making with visual texts. The purpose of this paper is to present a pedagogical framework for teaching visual literacies with social media memes using…

The aim of our study is to identify elements of young children's shared humour by observing children's own expressions in the everyday life of early childhood education and care (ECEC) centres aged 1-6 in three Finnish ECEC centres. Our analysis shows that young children's humour plays an important role in routine transitions and play situations.…

Using the framework of conversation analysis, this study investigated the interactional workings of laughter in task-based interactions. The analysis was drawn from 160 cases of pair work interactions, collected in 2nd-semester Japanese-as-a-foreign-language classrooms. The pair work activities examined in this study are mostly grammar-focused,…

Culture is an indispensable dimension of human life and also foreign language teaching and learning process; and as a part of the current trend, diverse cultural elements are covered in recently published English as a foreign language (EFL) coursebooks. These cultural elements are not limited to the target culture but they cover local and…

Employing drama activities in foreign language classes has proved to help language learners improve their skills. Within the context of drama course offered in an English Language Teacher Education program in Turkey, the present study suggests some drama activities based on well-known Nasreddin Hodja jokes. The study aims to find answers to…

Despite the popular belief that fun has a positive impact in learning contexts, empirical research on fun in the classroom has been limited. To extend research in this area, the goal of this study was to develop and validate a new scale to assess fun in the classroom and examine its relationship with student engagement. The multi-stage scale…

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 article describes an interactive way to help students learn to evaluate central tendency measures using a fictional story. The use of humour and fictional dire consequences may increase student understanding and engagement while reducing anxiety.

Lowman (1995) described the relationship between teacher and student and student engagement as the two most important ingredients in learning in higher education. Humour builds teacher-student connection (Berk, 1998) and engages students in the learning process. The bond between student and teacher is essential for learning, satisfaction, and…

Unmotivated, underachieving students pose a huge challenge for teachers. One way to motivate and stimulate student interest in a topic is to use humor. Humor can help students make new connections in learning and improves retention of information (Garner 2006). In this article, the authors describe how they integrated art and literature with…

This volume collects empirical studies applying Conversation Analysis to situations where second, third and other additional languages are used. A number of different aspects are considered, including how linguistic systems develop over time through social interaction, how participants 'do' language learning and teaching in classroom and everyday…

The universities and faculties which educate teachers of mathematics for teaching pupils/students of any age group from pre-school age to higher education carefully monitor and compare valuable results of this research, detect the areas in which the mathematical achievements of pupils should be improved at the national level and propose the ways…

The Russian-educated author describes active-learning classroom activities that she created and implemented during her first experience teaching lower- and upper-level undergraduate mathematics courses in the United States. The article begins with a discussion of how the author incorporated humorous stories and memo-pictures into the classroom.…

In 2004, in response to the need to revise oral practice and assessment in the second semester of Beginners French at Monash University, an eight-week group-based theatre project was developed and trialled. A specially adapted version of Tardieu's absurdist play "Le Guichet" was used to give students the opportunity to focus on oral…