Exploring L2Learners' Pragmatic Competence Through Jokes : A Qualitative Study of Swedish Upper Secondary Students’ Pragmatic Competence when Interpreting Canned Jokes

This study investigates Swedish upper secondary students’ pragmatic competence in the English 6 course. The aim is to study jokes potential to support their pragmatic development, potential difficulties in interpreting jokes and how a lesson centered on jokes influences the classroom climate. To this end, a lesson was conducted that included a warm-up activity, a pre-reading task, and required students to read a selection of jokes and complete a questionnaire consisting of Likert-scale items and open-ended questions. The responses were analyzed using content analysis and categorized to identify the most frequent responsepatterns. The results revealed that most students struggled to derive the implicatures of the jokes, largely due to limited schematic knowledge necessary for interpretation. Consequently, their access to the humor was restricted, and although some jokes were perceived as funny, students often had difficulty explaining why. Finally, the findings indicate that students would have preferred a lesson focused on the oral delivery of jokes rather than reading them, suggesting a lack of motivation when engaging with longer jokes.