Repetition and joking in children’s second language conversations: playful recyclings in an immersion classroom

Repetition is often associated with traditional teaching drills. Yet, it has been documented how repetitions are exploited by learners themselves (Duff, 2000). In a study of immersion classroom conversations, it was found that playful recyclings were recurrent features of young learners’ second language repertoires. Such joking events were identified on the basis of the participants’ displayed amusement, and they often involved activity based jokes (Lampert, 1996) and metapragmatic play, that is, joking about how or by whom something is said. Two types of recyclings: intertextual play and role appropriations were both important features in informal classroom entertainment and in the formation of a community of learners (cf. Rogoff, 1990). In a broad sense, both types of joking contained subversive elements in that they created play zones or ‘time out’ (cf. Goffman, 1959; Jefferson, 1996) within classroom activities. Moreover, role appropriations were subversive in that they inverted classroom hierarchies.