"Why is it funny?": um estudo sobre a apropriação discursiva do inglês por meio do humor veiculado pela comédia de situação Friends

• Autor(a) principal: Moreira, Patrícia Cardoso
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFG
• dARK ID: ark:/38995/0013000003kmt
• Texto Completo: http://repositorio.bc.ufg.br/tede/handle/tede/7568
• topic: Responsividade; Humor; Languaculture-inglês; Sitcom; Friends; Responsivity; Humor; Languaculture-english; Sitcom; LETRAS::LINGUAS ESTRANGEIRAS MODERNAS

This ethnographic case study aimed at demonstrating to what extent the constitutive elements of humor in the discursive level of the languaculture-English (LC2) was appropriated by twelve L2/FL learners. We have also tried to evidence how such learners assess the level of their English discursive knowledge by means of discursive practices involving humor, as well as the implications of such appropriation to their future careers as teachers of English as L2/FL. Data were collected in an English intermediate group of undergraduates of Letras/Inglês of the Universidade Federal de Goiás. Efforts were made to design and integrate activities focusing on the humor of the American situation comedy Friends (BRIGHT; KAUFFMAN; CRANE, 1994-2004) into eight classes of the original course program taking place between November 2015 and February 2106. Four Friends episodes were explored. The data collection was carried out by means of a questionnaire, video and audio recordings of the classes, field notes of the teacher-researcher observations and audios of interviews made with each participant after the classroom work was over. This paper is based on the dialogic perspective of Bakhtin (2011, 2012, 2014), on humor studies with emphasis on L2/FL teaching and learning (BELL; POMERANTZ, 2014; 2015; 2016) as well as on the nexus between humor, language and culture (KRAMSCH, 1998, 2013; RISAGER, 2006; CORBETT, 2003, POPA, 2014; DAVIES, 2014; DICIOCCIO; MICZO, 2014; ATTARDO, 1994, 2014). The data analysis reveals that the participants’ different levels of comprehension and appreciation of humor in Friends depend both on their linguistic proficiency and on their background knowledge on American culture and of world globalized culture. Such factors led to the active and responsive engagement of the undergraduates in dialogical interactions and the collective construction of meanings during the classes. As the participants positioned themselves at different levels of appropriation of the humor in the LC2, they also recognized the importance of such factor in the construction of their subjectivities as future English teachers.