The present study seeks to draw upon all three
in an exploration of teacher talk conducted in both English and Thai. Central
to the analysis will be the notion that humour is a form of verbal art which
may serve to play with social positions.
The study seeks to build upon the small body of work which has investigated
L2 classroom play; to my knowledge, it is the first to do so in a Thai context.
Moreover, unlike nearly all previous studies, it focuses on the teacher’s own
language play and the effect this has on students’ learning. The theoretical
framework of the research is also novel, seeking to integrate a notion of verbal
art with that of discourse theory.