A study of Chinese learners’ ability to comprehend irony☆
Introduction
By and large native speakers seem able to identify and interpret ironical utterances rapidly and without conscious attention (Gibbs, 2012) using the same mechanisms as for processing literal statements (Attardo, 2013). A question of interest, then, is whether second language (L2) learners are able to comprehend irony and if they can whether they do so subconsciously. There are two reasons to believe that learners may find irony difficult. First, the use of irony and the kinds of situations in which it is pragmatically appropriate in their own culture may differ from English-speaking cultures. Kim (2014), for example, reported that sarcasm (a negative form of irony) is not as pervasive in Korean as in English, and that Koreans tended to interpret irony as always conveying criticism. She gave several examples of misunderstanding, including this one:
Kim suggested that whereas native speakers often use irony for humorous purposes (as in the example above), Koreans associate it with criticism or insults. The second reason why L2 learners are likely to find irony difficult is that it requires a high level of proficiency to understand that what is said is not what is meant. For these reasons, we can expect that many L2 learners, especially those of low proficiency, will struggle to comprehend ironic comments and will need to engage conscious processes to do so. Below we review studies that support this claim.
The purpose of this article, then, is to add to the quite limited research on L2 learners' capacity to understand irony by investigating a sample of mixed-proficiency Chinese university students. In the theoretical background section that follows we provide a definition of irony, explain the difference between negative and positive irony, and consider the processing mechanisms involved in comprehending ironic utterances. We then review previous studies of L2 learners' ability to comprehend irony and the methods that have been used to assess irony.
Section snippets
Defining irony
In an ironic utterance the intended meaning is different from the literal meaning. According to the Gricean definition, irony is a type of implicature that is triggered by the violation of the Maxim of Quality (i.e. ‘Do not say what you know to be false’), causing the hearer to recognize that the literal meaning of an utterance is not the intended meaning and therefore to seek an alternative interpretation (Grice, 1975). For example, if a friend turns up late for a meeting and the speaker says,
Studies of L2 learners
As Kim (2014) noted, Korean learners of L2 English experience considerable difficulty in comprehending irony. Other studies show that this holds true for other groups of L2 learners. Shively, Menke and Manzon-Omundson (2008) for example, investigated three groups of English-speaking learners of Spanish in a university in the USA and reported that even the most advanced students had trouble perceiving irony. Bromberek-Dyzman and Rataj (2016) compared the responses of advanced learners of English
Methods for assessing comprehension of irony
Irony tests differ in a number of ways. An irony test can require learners to simply indicate whether they think an utterance is ironic or it can ask them to interpret its meaning (e.g. indicate whether it is strongly or mildly critical or humorous). To measure identification learners can be asked to underline which utterance in a written dialogue is ironic as in Al-Fatlawi (2018) and Kim and Lantolf (2018) or just decide whether an utterance is negative or positive in meaning as in
Research questions
The study we now report drew on the theoretical background outlined above and previous research on L2 learners’ ability to identify irony. We developed a new test of irony to investigate whether a sample of mixed proficiency Chinese learners of L2 English were able to successfully identify positive and negative irony in English. We were also interested in seeing if the learners were able to identify irony implicitly (i.e. without conscious attention) and whether language proficiency and
Item discrimination indices
The results are shown in Table 1. Using Ebel's (1979) guidelines, it is clear that the discriminability of the positive and negative literal items is poor or marginal (with the exception of item 1). However, the discriminability of the ironic items was much better with several very good (items 7, 16, 17, 5 and 20) and only one poor (item 14).
Judgment scores
Table 2, Table 3 give the Irony Test judgment scores for the Chinese students and the native speakers respectively. The students were more successful in
Discussion
The discrimination indices for the literal items were generally poor or marginal. This was not surprising as these items were developed to be easy for the learners so as to provide a point of comparison with the ironic items, which were expected to be more difficult as the descriptive statistics in Table 2, Table 5 confirm was the case. The indices for the ironic items were either reasonably or very good with one exception. On the whole the Irony Test functioned as intended although the
Conclusion
We began by suggesting that the capacity to process irony constitutes an advanced pragmatic ability (Bouton, 1994; Shively et al., 2008; Taguchi, 2007). The results of our study confirm this. L2 learners from a top-rated Chinese university were unable to consistently identify irony and in the case of positive irony only below the level of chance. The explanation lies partly in the lack of language proficiency but even those learners with high proficiency scores often failed to spot an utterance
Funding
The research reported in this article is part of a larger research project investigating the development of tests of implicit and explicit L2 pragmatic knowledge funded by the Australian Research Council.
Rod Ellis is currently a Research Professor in the School of Education, Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is also a visiting professor at Shanghai International Studies University and an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of the University of Auckland. He has recently been elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He has written extensively on second language acquisition and task-based language teaching. His most recent book is Reflections on Task-Based Language Teaching
References (36)
Are ironic acts deliberate?
J. Pragmat.
(2012)How Korean EFL learners understand sarcasm in L2 English
J. Pragmat.
(2014)Online Sarcasm and its Perception by Second Language Learners; the Case of Iraqi Learners in Iraq and UK
(2018)Intentionality and irony
- et al.
Multimodal markers of irony and sarcasm
Humor
(2003) A cross-cultural study of ability to interpret implicatures in English
World Englishes
(1988)Can NNS skill in interpreting implicature in American English be improved through formal instruction. Pragmatics and Language Learning
Monograph Series
(1994)- et al.
Ironic expression can simultaneously enhance and dilute perception of criticism
Discourse Process
(2013) - et al.
Irony comprehension in the non-native language comes at a cost
Psychol. Lang. Commun.
(2016) - et al.
Muting the meaning: a social function of irony
Metaphor Symbolic Act.
(1995)
Validation of the C-test amongst Hungarian EFL learners
Lang. Test.
Irony, Deception, and Humor: Seeking the Truth about Overt and Covert Untruthfulness
Essentials of educational measurement
Understanding figurative and literal language: the graded salience hypothesis
Cognit. Ling.
Logic and conversation
Syntax Semant.
On the methodological basis of introspective methods
Assessing second language pragmatics: an overview and introductions
Developing understanding of sarcasm in L2 English through explicit instruction
Lang. Teach. Res.
Cited by (10)
L2 learners' ability to recognize ironic online comments and the effect of instruction
2022, SystemCitation Excerpt :Cues are not always present or salient, however, so readers need to carefully consider the context and the writer's likely viewpoint to notice the incongruity between what is expected and the literal comment (Bamman & Smith, 2015; Wallace et al., 2014). L1 readers can have difficulty detecting verbal irony (e.g., Bruntsch & Ruch, 2017; Howman & Filik, 2020), and it may be even more challenging for language learners (Ellis et al., 2021; Kim & Lantolf, 2016; Prichard & Rucynski, 2020; Taguchi et al., 2016). In certain cultures, sarcasm may be less common, used in different contexts, or marked by different cues (Fitzgerald, 2013; Kim & Lantolf, 2016; Okamoto, 2007).
I was being sarcastic!: The effect of foreign accent and political ideology on irony (mis)understanding
2022, Acta PsychologicaCitation Excerpt :Another potential reason for the results may be less frequent use of irony by non-native speakers, thus producing a surprisal effect and tilting the listeners towards alternative explanations. We are not aware of any research examining the issue of irony use by non-native speakers directly; however, there is converging evidence that non-native speakers are less accurate and slower in irony detection in their non-native language, including Chinese learners of English (Bromberek-Dyzman & Rataj, 2016; Ellis et al., 2021). It is thus possible to hypothesize that, since irony detection seems to be one of the later acquired aspects of L2 pragmatic competence, non-native speakers may use it less often.
Task Effects in Irony Comprehension in English as a Foreign Language
2023, Language and SpeechL2 irony comprehension and the role of L2 proficiency and use
2023, Language AwarenessUnderstanding indirect meaning: A close replication
2023, Foreign Language Annals
Rod Ellis is currently a Research Professor in the School of Education, Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is also a visiting professor at Shanghai International Studies University and an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of the University of Auckland. He has recently been elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He has written extensively on second language acquisition and task-based language teaching. His most recent book is Reflections on Task-Based Language Teaching (2018), published by Multilingual Matters. He is is currently completing research funded by the Australian Research Council, investigating second language learners' pragmatic knowledge of English.
Dr. Yan Zhu is an associate professor at the College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Fudan University, China. Dr. Zhu's research focuses on foreign language curriculum innovation, task-based language teaching, and teacher education. Her publications have appeared in prestigious international journals, including Language Teaching Research, The Modern Language Journal, System, and Language Teaching, among others. She is currently the principal investigator for a project supported by the National Social Science Fund of China. Dr. Zhu is the associate editor of Language Teaching for Young Learners, an academic, peer-refereed journal. She was awarded ‘The Teaching Achievement Prize’ by the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission in 2014 and 2018.
Natsuko Shintani is a Professor in the Faculty of Foreign Language Studies, Kansai University. She obtained her PhD in Language Teaching and Learning from the University of Auckland in 2011. She has taught applied linguistics courses at the masters and doctoral levels at Nanyang Technological University and the University of Auckland. Her research interests encompass the roles of interaction in second language acquisition, second language writing, and task-based language teaching. Her work has been published in leading journals such as Language Learning, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Journal of Second Language Writing, and Applied Linguistics. She has published a book with John Benjamins, titled Input-based Tasks in Foreign Language Instruction for Young Learners. Her new co-authored book, Task-based language teaching: Theory and practice, has been published with Cambridge University Press.
Carsten Roever is Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. He holds a PhD in Second Language Acquisition from the University of Hawai'i. His research interests include language testing, second language pragmatics, conversation analysis and quantitative research methods. He is particularly interested in the learning of L2 pragmatics for languages other than English. He is the co-author (with Naoko Taguchi) of Second Language Pragmatics (2017, Oxford University Press) and (with Aek Phakiti) Quantitative Methods for Second Language Research (2018, Routledge). He is currently working on a volume on teaching and testing L2 pragmatics and interactional competence, which is to appear with Routledge in 2021.
- ☆
The research reported in this article is part of a larger research project investigating the development of tests of implicit and explicit L2 pragmatic knowledge funded by the Australian Research Council.