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Title:
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Producing Verbal Play in English: A contrastive study of advanced German learners of English and English native speakers
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Author:
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Chris Baudy
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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Universität Hamburg
, Department of Foreign Language Learning and Teaching
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Degree Date:
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2007
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Applied Linguistics
Sociolinguistics
Translation
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Subject Language(s):
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English
German, Standard
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Director(s):
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Willis Edmondson
Juliane House
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Abstract:
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The objective of this qualitative-explorative study is to identify the
constraints typical in adult advanced German learners of English when
producing an English punning version of a German source text. Here the
academic areas of play, creativity and humour meet foreign language
learning and translation theory. Consequently, the study extends the
theoretical scope of foreign language learning to the fields of play,
creativity and humour research. It advances a clear nomenclature covering
concepts such as (verbal) play, (verbal) creativity and (verbal) humour,
sense of humour, joke competence, communicative competence, and many more.
The qualitative part of this work case-studies adult advanced German
learners of English and English native speakers and compares their
introspective data elicited in a translation experiment: Next to producing
an English version of a German TV sketch, the subjects were to keep a
hand-written diary with their thoughts and actions before, during and after
their trials and give a retrospective interview on finishing the task.
Due to the creative load of the task the data are presented analogous to
the '4 P's' of creativity research: product, process, place and person. It
appears that the successful solution of such language production tasks
depends - regardless of the language user status - on the favourable
conflux of a host of interrelated and inter-individually differing
procedural, contextual and psychological variables. Of these, interest,
information, involvement and imagination (the 4 I's) appear to be the core
factors. With respect to the punning constraints found in the German
participants of this study, insufficient factual and procedural English
knowledge seems to be the ultimate limitation next to a deficient degree of
(a) confidence in their individual English speaking powers and (b) risk-taking.
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