In the globalized economy, old metadiscursive regimes have been challenged by new conditions which are often considered to be more favourable to heteroglossic practices. In Flemish Belgium, the liberalization of the TV market is said to have transformed the broadcaster VRT from a public service aiming at educating viewers into a competitive…

Corporate mission, a core part of corporate culture, plays an important role in the development and competition of companies. The study of mission statements is beneficial to both companies and stakeholders. This paper explores corporate mission from the perspective of linguistics on the basis of speech act theory and adaptation theory and reveals…

This article presents an innovative technique for teaching the principles of experimental design in a way that is entertaining and engaging for students. Following a lecture on experimental design, students participate in an experiment in which the teacher uses a funny segment from a movie to test the influence of implicit social norms. Randomly…

This paper shows how humour is deployed in Achebe's "A Man of the People" by analysing the make-up of the various instances of humour as well as their significance in attaining the desired effects. To Veatch (1998), humour contains two incongruous elements; one element is socially normal while the other is a violation of the…

Roald Dahl is famous for his lexical creativity, for his skill in naming his characters, his ability to create names for a variety of imagined creatures and sweets, and for his most mentioned achievement in creating the language used by the BFG. This paper presents an overview of the development and patterning of Dahl's word creation as found in a…

Linguistically speaking, the concept of humor, which seems to be vast for people, has specific dimensions by which it is generated including: puns, irony, sarcasm, wittiness, and contrastive utterances in relation to the speakers of those utterances. It is about how the extra linguistics elements dominate the situation and the delivery of humor.…

There has been a recent emergence of scholarship on the use of fun in the college statistics classroom, with at least 20 modalities identified. While there have been randomized experiments that suggest that fun can enhance student achievement or attitudes in statistics, these studies have generally been limited to one particular fun modality or…

Emotion characterises learners' feedback experiences. While the failure-to-fail literature suggests that emotion may be important, little is known about the role of emotion for educators. Secondary analyses were therefore conducted on data exploring 110 trainers' and trainees' feedback experiences. Group and individual narrative interviews were…

This study examined online student feedback to determine the extent to which students identify strengths of character in their perceptions of professors and whether student-identified character strengths could distinguish between teaching-award winners (n = 120) and research-award winners (n = 119). A content analysis of posted comments on…

Social media (SoMe) is increasingly used in higher education (HE) to access knowledge and enable global communication. The SoMe platform Twitter® is particularly beneficial in these contexts because it is readily accessible, easily searchable (via hashtags) and global. Given these advantages, the twitter platform @AskAnatomist was created to…

There has been little research into how children use language play in writing. The unprompted language play of 36 children was investigated through their writing of a short advertisement. The sample comprised three attainment sub-groups from a larger repeat-design study of persuasive writing in the 9-11 age-range. The writing was analysed using…

In this article, the authors present a literacy research project in which humor, popular culture, and improvisational comedy (improv) are viewed as curricular resources to engage students' minds "and" bodies in multimodal story building, following a posthuman assemblage theory approach to literacy learning. This approach takes students'…

The aim of this study is to determine how the 5-6 year-old preschool children evaluate the humour through pictural analysis of their drawings about humour. The study was conducted with 52 preschoolers aged 5-6 at independent preschools attached to the Ministry of National Education. The data were collected through drawing and interview techniques.…

What effect does political comedy have on political interest? Through an experimental design, changes in political interest are measured through a pre and posttest, comparing groups randomly assigned to watch "The Daily Show," "NBC Nightly News," "Entertainment Tonight" and a no-exposure group. Models indicate…

We all know that they do it, but what do students laugh "about" when learning science together? Although research has shown that students do use humor when they learn science, the role of humor in science education has received little attention. In this study, undergraduate students' laughter during collaborative work in physics has been…