Abstract
The opening chapter of the book begins by illustrating how the appreciation of everyday humour often depends on a shared history. Such shared history is integral to the humorous language play which features in this book. The chapter then goes on to explain how the author’s interest in investigating such play arose from his experiences of teaching and managing intensive English business courses for executives. The well-being and success of participants on the courses seemed to be reflected, in part, in the extent to which they and their fellow group members indulged in playful behaviour, despite contextual factors which seemed to militate against it. The rest of the chapter provides a breakdown of the chapters to follow.
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Notes
- 1.
I use the terms ‘L1 speaker’, ‘L1 user’ or ‘native speaker’ in the book to refer to someone who had spoken a language for communicative purposes since childhood, and ‘L2 speaker’ or ‘non-native speaker’ for “..somebody who has an L1, or L1s other than English” (Seidlhofer 2011: 6). I often use the term “learner” or “learners”, especially when differentiating L2 speakers from their teacher. None of these terms are uncontroversial but this is a debate that would side track my focus, so I will simply acknowledge it here.
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Hann, D. (2020). Introduction. In: Spontaneous Play in the Language Classroom. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26304-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26304-1_1
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