DOI: http://doi.org/10.15350/2409-7616.2021.3.21

UDC 37.026.6

Nikolaeva N.N.¹ (Moscow, Russian Federation) – E-mail: nnn55n73@mail.ru

¹Bauman Moscow State Technical University

Abstract. The article considers the use of an English humorous social networking webpage for the methodological and pedagogical purposes in Russian tertiary education.  The study aims at analyzing the communicative and linguistic potential of English humor from the webpage Pinterest boards, which can be used to develop technical university students’ intercultural competence. The significant methodological and pedagogical potential of humorous multimodal texts is relevant for our students’ second-language acquisition and its usage in online authentic sociocultural spaces. The research employs statistical, comparative, analytical, and interpretative methods while dealing with humor in pins, as well as questionnaires, public presentations, pair and group discussions in the classrooms. The results prove that social networks have much educational effectiveness in teaching and mastering English. Based on incongruence as the basis for humor interpretation, we develop linguistic, emotional-cognitive and communicative criteria for categorizing humorous texts (pins) into linguistic and sociocultural categories followed by funny, sad, and neutral subcategories which correspond to our students’ engineering mentality. This approach appears helpful for understanding British humor. It also seems appropriate to comply with the technical university standards as it focuses on the development of interpersonal, international, and business communication skills in English. Our study provides students with some learning tools for perceiving British national features and raising sociocultural awareness. Social network communications inspire the students’ confidence in their second-language knowledge: from 97% to 82% of the participants reacted positively to the research materials, methods, and results.

Keywords:humanitarization of technical education, intercultural communication, English language teaching, Internet communication, social networks, humor, creolized texts.

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For citation:

Nikolaeva N.N. Using humorous social networking webpage for studying English at technical university. CITISE, 2021, no. 3, pp.254-271. DOI: http://doi.org/10.15350/2409-7616.2021.3.21