Humor in gesture-speech incongruity when explaining vocabulary

Abstract This paper examines a teacher’s humor through gesture-speech incongruity when explaining vocabulary in a beginning ESL classroom. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we analyze the teacher’s humor through gesture-speech incongruity when explaining the word ‘handcuffs.’ While the incongruity of humor in social interaction contains only the verbal aspect, our analysis shows that it is a performance of both verbal and embodied actions. Further, it shows that the teacher’s humor of gesture-speech incongruity generates prolonged laughter and smiling from students. We argue that such humorous moments facilitate student engagement and make the relevant word easy for them to understand. Findings contribute to still under-investigated research of humor in gesture-speech incongruity in vocabulary explanation, particularly for beginning ESL learners and have practical implications for language teachers regarding implementing humor in vocabulary explanations.