Using humor to create interactional opportunities in video-mediated Turkish L2 classrooms

This chapter examines how humor is used as a pedagogical resource in video-mediated Turkish L2 classrooms. Using multimodal conversation analysis, this chapter shows how teachers employ humor in a pre-reading phase of a lesson to promote student engagement and create interactional opportunities when student responses are deemed inaccurate, minimal, or non-existent. The findings demonstrate how and when teachers employ questions, topic shifts, and offer prompts through non-serious questions, playful requests, or self-deprecating remarks to manage comprehension checks, facilitate whole-class discussions and multiparty interaction, leveraging video-mediated features, such as shared screen and e-book tools. In the interactional unfolding of humorous exchanges, students transform their responses into expanded turns by providing acknowledgements in evaluations and reciprocate with their own humorous utterances. The findings have broader implications for video-mediated interaction and humor in L2 contexts, shedding light on the pedagogical aspects of humor and its potential significance in L2 learning. Furthermore, this research bridges the gap between institutional goals and the dynamics of humor in video-mediated pedagogical settings, showcasing how humor creates learning opportunities in a risk-free manner while building rapport and minimizing the face-threatening potential of video-mediated language teaching classrooms.