How to make an impact on a kid's memory? Try a good laugh! Here's what we can learn from comedians:
Imagine you are a fifteen year old exchange student. Your new family, your new class and your new school are cool.
You had fairly good language skills when you arrived and you're continue to improve every day. But you realize:
To get the hang of the classroom banter on top of learning all that's new to you is quite a handful to handle.
But then your teachers says "Here is a language exercise, a laugh and a lesson - all in one!"
And he puts a 20 minute video clip on the screen. Comedy!
About topics you probably even used to find pretty boring until now.
Like local politics, body shaming, organ transplants, LGBT communities, the coal industry, the Chinese one-child policy, pregnancy centers, multilevel marketing, weather forecasts, pharmacy scandals, gene editing, immigration, the Nobel
Prize, the elections in France, a referendum in Switzerland, education policies in Japan, African economic strategies,
chicken factories, Scottish independence, the Supreme Court, Trump's presidency, carbon dioxide emissions, the Great
Pacific garbage patch, nuclear waste and the Dalai Lama.
With every clip you learn a lot, have a real laugh and pick up many new words. And you will remember them!
You had fairly good language skills when you arrived and you're continue to improve every day. But you realize:
To get the hang of the classroom banter on top of learning all that's new to you is quite a handful to handle.
But then your teachers says "Here is a language exercise, a laugh and a lesson - all in one!"
And he puts a 20 minute video clip on the screen. Comedy!
About topics you probably even used to find pretty boring until now.
Like local politics, body shaming, organ transplants, LGBT communities, the coal industry, the Chinese one-child policy, pregnancy centers, multilevel marketing, weather forecasts, pharmacy scandals, gene editing, immigration, the Nobel
Prize, the elections in France, a referendum in Switzerland, education policies in Japan, African economic strategies,
chicken factories, Scottish independence, the Supreme Court, Trump's presidency, carbon dioxide emissions, the Great
Pacific garbage patch, nuclear waste and the Dalai Lama.
With every clip you learn a lot, have a real laugh and pick up many new words. And you will remember them!
Here comes the comedian masterclass!
2013 we started an experiment based on seven key ideas ...
1.) Laughter and amazing revelations make us want to know more:
"That's funny!" and "I had no idea that ...!" absolutely works.
2.) We start to feel at home in a new place when we realize we get the humour.
3.) Humour lets you to come to grips with the puns, colloquialisms and regional vernacular of a language.
4.) Friends and peers enjoy helping a keen-to-learn newcomer understand what they are laughing about.
5.) Good comedy delivers the essence of a country's social life, politics and peculiar characteristics.
6.) The web offers a never ending bandwidth of material to learn from and laugh about.
For free. In so many languages.
7.) Laughter bonds people together.
You want to understand language & people? Take the fast lane. Watch good comedy!
Comedy and advertising have something in common: They have to get the point across really well, fast and memorable.
Our partner schools all over the world have used comedy clips with tremendous success. They work exclusively with video clips from public sources like Youtube and Vimeo that are free to use and free to share. TED Talks are also quite popular, they are not really comedy but many of them are truly entertaining. Teachers pick the right material to suit the age group and language skills of their class and of the exchange student who can then share the clip with his class mates at home. Many of these clips have also caused controversies, changed stock markets, triggered public conversations - their effects have become part of the conversation in class. Here is one example:
Our partner schools all over the world have used comedy clips with tremendous success. They work exclusively with video clips from public sources like Youtube and Vimeo that are free to use and free to share. TED Talks are also quite popular, they are not really comedy but many of them are truly entertaining. Teachers pick the right material to suit the age group and language skills of their class and of the exchange student who can then share the clip with his class mates at home. Many of these clips have also caused controversies, changed stock markets, triggered public conversations - their effects have become part of the conversation in class. Here is one example:
Time Magazine, amongst many other publications in the US and abroad, ran an article on this clip.
https://time.com/4778645/john-oliver-kidney-dialysis-taco-bell/
https://time.com/4778645/john-oliver-kidney-dialysis-taco-bell/
Of course, using humour to teach has been a successful strategy for a long time! For readers interested in knowing more about this topic we recommend to dive into the work of Nancy D. Bell of Washington State University: "Learning about and through humor in the second language classroom"!
