Towards a Cross-linguistic Analysis of Perception of Tone in Academic Reading Materials

1 Introduction: Language learning at best is an arduous process. Coupled with trying to achieve success in academic areas, the task at times might seem insurmountable. Well aware that students might need some relief from the constant onslaught of information, textbook writers at times insert some degree of light heartedness to keep the reader engaged. The concern this study addresses is the problem of language students’ not recognizing tone that might be interpreted as something other than serious in academic reading materials in the English language,and whether or not linguistic group could offer any insight. Effective intercultural communication in a global context has now become imperative as the number of students studying in English internationally has become significant. 2 The problem: As many academic instructors can attest, the ability to identify tone in textbook reading often goes undetected by many English Second Language students, thereby reducing the students’ understanding that not all of their educational experience is dull and dry. Language instructors are often perplexed by students’ inability to identify humour as a tone in some reading assignments. Many academic writers do inject a little lightheartedness here and there in order to make their writing a little less dull and hopefully to foster an interest in whatever information it is they are trying to transmit. When students are asked to read a passage or essay and then to identify any parts that seemed humorous - or less than serious-the task is not always possible for everyone. Even when the vocabulary and syntax are relatively simple, the ability to recognize the correct tone is still elusive. Perhaps the problem sometimes rests in such culturally contrasting senses of humour that it is impossible for some students to perceive the language as humorous or entertaining. Sometimes, because of pre-existing cultural schema, humour in a textbook would be completely unexpected. Although a student may still understand the information, not recognizing the author’s effort makes the reading experience just a little bit less enjoyable and the reader perhaps a little less engaged than might be possible. Research abounds on many aspects of cross linguistic differences in humour, particularly joke telling (Attardo, 1994). Ample research also exists on how language learning can be facilitated by the incorporation of humour (Bell, 2009). However, there seems to be little information specific to cross linguistic differences regarding tone recognition in academic materials. 3 The study: This paper presents an overview of an empirical study done at a Canadian university examining responses from approximately 400 first year university students from 14 different linguistic groups as related to perceived differences of humorous tone in academic textbooks from a range of subject areas. The questionnaire used for the study is a hand built corpus of actual passages taken from first year academic textbooks, first piloted on faculty to assure the humour value. The study then analyses the results for specific areas of difference while applying theories of formulaic language to account for some of the problematic items. This study provides some empirical evidence that when learners are not yet highly familiar with the usual contextualized phrases of a language, it is difficult to sense when register variations for the purpose of humour or some other engaging-type language have occurred. This paper proposes the need for much larger collections of humour derived from textbooks. A sizeable natural databank could help teachers give students the skills to better appreciate textbook authors’ intentions. This research is in further development to a paper published in Language and Humour in the Media, Cambridge Scholars, 2012, which applied sociolinguistic schema theory to a prior smaller sampling that addressed both literary and non-literary texts.