Joking repeats (Cekaite & Aronsson, 2004)

Cekaite, A. & Aronsson, K. (2004). Repetition and joking in children’s second language conversations: playful recyclings in an immersion classroom. Discourse Studies, 6, 373–392.

Asta Cekaite and Karin Aronsson explore how children use recyclings and repetition as a form of humour and to subvert classroom hierarchies. In the early stages of L2 learning, where language proficiency makes a challenge of joking – the 7-10-year-old children in this Swedish classroom, children recycled prior turns of both peers and teachers to invite alignment and achieve a range of joking behaviours. The analysis in this paper shows ‘that format tying was an important device for rearranging social relations within a classroom community, both in terms of participation frameworks (alignments), and mode (serious, non-serious).’ (p. 387)