Verbal Humor and Impoliteness in Student-Teacher Relationships

This study of an incident involving a male Chinese university lecturer and two Thai learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) who were engaged in verbal humor in intercultural classroom communication examined whether two variables, namely the genders and roles of the metaparticipants, caused them to regard the verbal humor in question as an impoliteness act, as well as the metaparticipants’ metapragmatic evaluations regarding the humor. A further aim was to examine whether the cited incident affected the student-teacher relationship from the metaparticipants’ perspectives. In total, 80 Thai EFL learners’ metapragmatic evaluations of the lecturer’s verbal humor were investigated. The chi-square test results revealed that male Thai EFL learners regarded the verbal humor as being impolite significantly more often than the females did; moreover, the participants were more likely to regard the verbal humor as an impoliteness act when they were the direct targets than when they were witnesses. The factors that led the metaparticipants to regard the verbal humor as being successful or a failed attempt revealed that the metaparticipants who regarded the attempt as being impolite were mainly influenced by the Thai culture. Furthermore, almost half of the participants indicated that they would have some short-term negative affect following the incident. Accordingly, lecturers should be more careful when creating verbal humor in which their students are the direct targets in intercultural classroom communication. Lecturers should also avoid using words with negative connotations.