Lessons with Laughter George Woolard LANGUAGEsccentantepectte coe Introduction Lessons with humour Moet reaching materials are not humorous. If there is humour in the classroom, it comes from sro ttacher and the students, Lessons with Laughter js designed to Dring humour into your Tessone, When students find something humorous, their learning becomes OT enjoyable and their motivation increases, The lessons in the four sections of this book bring humour and English together, Let them discover the humour You cannot teach humour, If you have to explain it, 5 n> Jonger funny. The secret of the lessons in this book is to allow your students to discover the humour for themselves. Most often humour grows out of a language situation with more than one meaning ~ usually there isa well-known literal meaning plus a metaphorical meaning. Your role as teacher is not to lead your students by the hand through the ‘wonderful world of British humour. Your role is to set up lessons where students can discover meaning for themselves: you will need to give them time to do this, You may explain the odd word. You will definitely encourage the use of dictionaries, And you will monitor the ourcome of the problem-solving activities. If some in the class cannot see the joke, it 1s better to let the others in the class explain it - even if they have to do so in their own language. Resist the rempration to be the class comedian. This is serious learning When you find something amusing, you are more liable to remember it. When students vFraee new meanings for themselves, they are more likely to remember them because they Taughed. This means that language items contained in humorous exes more likely to be retained than if you had simply taught them in a conventional way Students will want to retell the jokes and stories to other students, thereby reinforcing their learning A Lexical Approach Move and mote teachers are seeing the advantages of raking a lexical approach to language. “The jokes and stories in this book axe full of useful word partnerships, fixed expressions, and sentence heads. Four sections The four sections of lessons exploit the four common types of humorous text: 1 Jokes - understanding double meaning 2 Cartoons ~ predicting and understanding captions 3. Misprints finding and understanding them 4+ Reading for Fun ~ graded funny stories with an amusing last line “The lessons and the sections are not designed to be used in any particular order. This book is 4 resource from which you can draw whatever you find suitable “The lessons in sections 1 ~ 3 are fillers’ which you can use whenever you feel she need for something lighter. The Reading for Fun Section contains one page stories, many of which will take a whole lesson to read and exploit. The Misprints and Reading sections make morivating homework. the che author of this material, I have heard much laughter in my classes. I hope your classes will have as much fun as mine have had. George Woolard Edinburgh 1996Contents Section One: Jokes Lesson 1 Lesson 2 Lesson 3 Lesson 4 Lesson 5 Lesson 6 Lesson 7 Lesson 8 Lesson 9 Lesson 10 Lesson 11 Lesson 12 Lesson 13 Lesson 14 Lesson 15 Lesson 16 Lesson 17 Lesson 18 Lesson 19 Lesson 20 Lesson 21 Lesson 22 Lesson 23 Lesson 24 Lesson 25 Lesson 26 Lesson 27 Lesson 28 Lesson 29 Idioms Phrasal Verbs Word Partnerships Puns Homophones Unusual Expressions Missing Words Moving Stress Misunderstandings Books and their Authors Present Perfect Jokes Conditional Jokes Comparative Jokes Jokes with SO. . . THAT The Best Way Misunderstanding Grammar Questions with HOW Questions with WHY Any Suggestions? What’s the Context? Insulting Remarks Definitions Paradoxical Jokes What's the Difference? ‘Waiter! Waiter! Doctor! Doctor! Making Fun of Teachers! Alphabet Jokes Elephant Jokes Section Two: Cartoons Lesson 30 Lesson 31 Lesson 32 Lesson 33 Lesson 34 Lesson 35 Lesson 36 Lesson 37 Lesson 38 What’s Missing 1 What’s Missing 2 What's Missing 3 What Happens Next 1 What Happens Next 2 What Happens Next 3 What's the Caption 1 What's the Caption 2 What’s the Caption 3