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Ma Sha Allah!” Creating Community Through Humor Practices in a Diverse Arabic Language Flagship Classroom

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Ma Sha Allah!” Creating Community Through Humor Practices in a Diverse Arabic Language Flagship Classroom “MA SHA ALLAH!” CREATING COMMUNITY THROUGH HUMOR PRACTICES IN A DIVERSE ARABIC LANGUAGE FLAGSHIP CLASSROOM By Sara Katherine Hillman A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Second Language Studies 2011 ABSTRACT “MA SHA ALLAH!” CREATING COMMUNITY THROUGH HUMOR PRACTICES IN A DIVERSE ARABIC LANGUAGE FLAGSHIP CLASSROOM By Sara Katherine Hillman Drawing on Lave and Wenger's (1991) and Wenger's (1998) communities of practice (CoP) framework, this study explores the shared repertoire of humor practices in the creation of community within the context of a culturally diverse and multilevel adult Arabic language classroom consisting of two native speakers, five heritage language learners (HLLs), and three second language (L2) learners. These learners were the first cohort of students to participate in a new government-funded university Arabic Flagship Program. Employing both a macro-level ethnographic analysis and a micro-level discourse analysis of video-taped classroom interaction, this study analyzes how participants displayed their individual and relational identities (Boxer & Cortés-Conde, 1997), community membership, and levels of participation in this classroom community through conversational joking and responses to canned joke-telling by the teacher. I analyze the data through notions of frames, footing, keying (Goffman, 1974, 1981; Gumperz, 1982), double-voicing (Bakhtin, 1986), and other contextualization cues. I also draw on the findings of previous research on humor in conversation (e.g., Bell, 2002; Boxer & Cortés-Conde, 1997; Norrick, 1993, 2004; Sacks, 1995) and humor in the classroom (e.g., Cekaite & Aronsson, 2004) in interpreting my data. The findings reveal humorous interactive processes and negotiations of meaning which make up the shifting participation of learners in this classroom community. They show patterns of language in interaction by learners, such as teasing classmates by code- switching into other dialects of Arabic which differed from a student’s own heritage dialect, teasing the teacher or classmates with Arabic colloquialisms, parodying the teacher’s voice, and a hierarchical display of responses and peer scaffolding to canned jokes told by the teacher. I argue that these humor practices were not only sites for identity display and relational identity display by my participants, but they also helped to mitigate tensions, soften face-threatening acts, and protect members’ positive face needs in the classroom, ultimately contributing to the creation of a very inclusive, close-knit community with relatively low language learning anxiety for all its members. I also suggest that these humor practices created beneficial contexts for scaffolding and learning of Arabic culture and dialect. The findings are additionally discussed in terms of the CoP framework as well as more recent expansions and critiques of this framework (e.g., Haneda, 2006). Copyright by SARA KATHERINE HILLMAN 2011 DEDICATION To the Egyptian people: it was your linguistic creativity, humor, and wit that made me a lover of the Arabic language, and during the stress of writing my dissertation, your revolution inspired me and motivated me to keep pushing onward toward my goals. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, my gratitude must be extended to my dissertation advisor, Dr. Debra Friedman, who guided me throughout my doctoral studies and offered me incredibly useful feedback on all my research and on navigating and surviving the PhD process in general. She was instrumental in shaping my identity as a researcher and my perspectives on second language learning, and it was her wisdom and encouragement which helped me overcome moments of blockage and frustration in completing this dissertation. I am also thankful for her patience, and her last-minute-before-the-deadline feedback, which no doubt took lots of time and energy. Additionally, I appreciate the time, flexibility, and valuable feedback of my other committee members: Drs. Brahim Chakrani, Susan Gass, and Paula Winke. I am especially grateful to Dr. Chakrani who spent tedious hours with me editing my Arabic transcripts while he was fasting for Ramadan! My participants Mousa, Mohamed, Zihad, Ihab, Rahman, Layla, Tareq, Noor, Mary, Joe, and the Arabic teacher also deserve special appreciation. Without their willingness to let me video-tape and record their classroom interactions, this dissertation would have never come to pass. I am also thankful for the help and support of the staff of the Arabic Flagship Program at Michigan State University, in particular Anne Baker, Wafa Hassan and Alicia Rice, and many Arabic-speaking friends and colleagues who assisted me with some of the rough transcriptions and answered my various questions about use of words and meanings. vi Among my friends and colleagues at MSU, Emma Trentman, Amy Thompson, Kimi Nakatsukasa, and Jennifer Behney deserve special thanks for providing me with support and mental stability during times of stress and academic insecurity. Discussions with them contributed to both my intellectual and personal growth throughout my doctoral studies. Last but not least, I would like to thank members of my family for their love and support during this project. My husband, Hamdy Kassem, deserves my tremendous love and gratitude for giving me both space to work, as well as always taking care of me and making sure I was nourished with home-cooked meals and cups of shay bi-l-na῾nā῾, “Egyptian mint tea,” especially during the last busy months of finishing up this dissertation. He was also incredibly helpful and patient in answering my questions about the Arabic language and proofreading much of my initial transcriptions. My parents, Paul and Olivia Hillman, and my sister and brother, Rachel Shafran and Nathan Hillman, also deserve thanks for their steadfast love and support, and for instilling in me since a very young age, a love and appreciation for language, culture, and intellectual inquiry. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................. xi LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... xii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS .......................................................................................... xiii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1 Motivation for the Current Study .................................................................................3 Arabic Diglossia and Arabic HLLs ..............................................................................4 Theoretical Framework: Communities of Practice (CoP) ............................................7 Theoretical Perspectives on Identity ..........................................................................11 Linguistic Humor and Identity ...................................................................................13 Defining Humor Practices ..........................................................................................15 Organization of the Study ...........................................................................................16 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW ..................................................................................................18 Language Learning Classrooms as Communities of Practice ....................................18 Humor, Language Play, and Second Language Learning ..........................................22 Theories of Humor and its Functions .........................................................................32 The Current Study ......................................................................................................34 CHAPTER 3 METHOD ..........................................................................................................................35 Context: The Arabic Flagship Program ......................................................................35 Participants .................................................................................................................36 Flagship Curriculum ...................................................................................................43 Flagship Course: ARB 500 as a Community of Practice ...........................................44 Participants’ Perspectives on ARB 500……………………………………...47 Participants’ Perspectives on Themselves and on Each Other .................50 Relationship of the Researcher ...................................................................................61 Data Collection ...........................................................................................................62 Data Analysis..............................................................................................................65 Interviews ...................................................................................................65 viii Classroom Interaction Data ......................................................................66 Identifying Play Frames .............................................................................................68 Playful Frames as Co-Constructed .............................................................................72 Transcription...............................................................................................................73
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