American Language Institute

TEFL Training Certificate Program

Summer 2018

TEFL Training Program

Lesson Plan Template

Teacher/s: Brian Jauregui Date: October 30th, 2018

Class: ESL Fundamental Level: Intermediate- Advanced

Goal:

Objectives: (In a perfect world) Students Will Be Able To…

1. Understand types of jokes
2. Use vocab for jokes (no vocab given)
3. Deconstruct types of jokes – why is the joke funny.

Lesson Theme (e.g. U.S. holidays): Humor + Jokes and Vocab- (no vocab given)

Activity / Skill Procedure Interaction Pairings Time

(S-S, T-Ss, (pairs,
WC) groups of 4)

Warm Up: Write a joke or
two on the board
Transition to Activity #1: Do
you like these kinds of jokes?
A. Why don’t people play poker in the jungle?
- Because there's too many
cheetahs.
B. My new thesaurus is terrible.
- Not only that, but it’s also…
terrible.
C. Why did the scarecrow win an - award? t-s 5-10
- He was outstanding in his field. min
Explain: Usually when people explain a joke it
tends to lose its comedic affect but were going
to do it anyways because we want to know how
jokes (often lame ones) are constructed.

Activity 1: Were these jokes: • Why?

Funny, hilarious, not funny, a (I don’t get it, I just don’t think
little funny? that’s funny, I like it because…)
• Can you explain what made this joke a
joke?
(word play, unexpected, it’s just
• Do you understand the plain dumb, etc..) t-s pairs 5-10
jokes? min
• have them decipher why it’s
Transition to #2: supposed to be funny.
Group activity 1- hand out
pieces of paper.
Activity 2: Give Every group a have the teams work together to (first)
joke on a piece of paper. understand it. After they understand the
joke, they will tell it to the class.

s-s Groups of 10 min

Transition to Wrap-up: we’re 2-4
just about done with this small
activity, but do you guys want
to share any of your own
APPROPRIATE jokes?
Wrap-up: Ask students to come up with a joke (from
Have class share their jokes their own culture if they'd like) and try to tell
it in English. WC 5 min

Lesson Evaluation Procedures:

Telling
Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to
be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs.

Punchline
The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this
punchline / response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour.
Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its
understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary,
opposing interpretation.

Responding
Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is
entertained.

Shifting contexts, shifting texts

The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs.[29] The narrator
automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same
time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline.

Joking relationships
The context of joking in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by
anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and
joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners.
Materials: good and bad jokes + list of definitions

Anticipated Problems & Suggested Solutions: Like right now? I don’t have any vocab words to work
with.

Contingency Plans (what you will do if you finish early, etc.): Keep on telling jokes and deconstruct
them.