1. Full name: Tran Thi Ai Hoa

2. Sex: Female

3. Date of birth:  June, 6th 1966

4. Place of  birth: Vy Da, Hue

5. Admission decision number: 1077/QĐ-ĐHNN according to the Decision of the Director of Hanoi National University, dated on November, 09th 2009

6. Changes in academic process:

- Two-time thesis title change

- Two-year extension and one-year adjournment

7. Official thesis title: Developing tour guide students’ ability to make sense of humour in English jokes through authentic materials

8. Major: English Language Teaching Methodology

9. Code: 09 04 80 08

10. Supervisors:

Supervisor 1: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyen Phuong Nga

Supervisor 2: Dr. To Thi Thu Huong

11. Summary of the new findings of the thesis:

The findings from the preliminary phase provided useful criteria for selection and adaptation of authentic materials for tour guide students, such as the appropriate types and topics of English jokes for using in the English language classroom and tour guiding practice including canned jokes at elementary and pre-intermediate level: short and about 200 words long; covering the three simple types of verbal humour: incongruous word, sentence and discourse similar to linguistic, cultural and reality-based jokes in the form of funny short stories, riddles and one-and-two liners. A set of authentic materials based on competency was then selected consisting of authentic English jokes. In parallel, an interface of humour competence, language learning process and pragmatic competence were applied to propel the implementation of the proposed authentic materials to success. As such, focusing on the three macro skills of speaking, listening and reading, the students learn jokes in pairs, groups with real-world and pedagogical tasks with the assistance of visual aids, cartoons, pictures, hand-outs, newspapers, magazines, audio, video, etc. in the intervention phase. The results of the intervention phase showed that the TGU students could recognize, understand and appreciate the humour in English jokes and more than that many of them could recite full joke story successfully.

Although this study does not make a generalization for a wide range of application in the whole country, it has demonstrated that sense of humor can be trained. Thus, the study has challenged the traditional conception that sense of humour is in-born and it is impossible to train humour, especially for Vietnamese tour guide students who learn English as a foreign language. The study has shown that, through training, the tour guide students who learn English as a foreign language in the study can develop their ability to comprehend humor and recite English jokes. Furthermore, being able to make sense of humour in English jokes has helped these students develop their language and communication skills with humour which in turns could help improve their English language learning. This is a new contribution of the present study.

12. Practical applicability, if any:

Though this study does not aim at generalizing the findings to the whole context of Vietnam, it is supposedly meaningful in some aspects. It contributes to enriching the theories on English language teaching methods and skills that are integrated with the student's understanding of the elements that make up humor in literature and literary documents. Practically speaking, the results of the study have provided a special set of English language teaching - learning materials for tour guide students to not only develop their ability to make sense of humour in English jokes, but also to develop their communication skills in the realm of humour in order to communicate with English-speaking tourists and especially tourists from English speaking countries in the world.

13. Further research directions, if any:

IT is suggested that further studies use a much broader collection of authentic jokes which contain more complex humour elements such as incongruous genre and incongruous world (Obrst, 2012) in the Linguistic humour structure spectrum so that the impacts of socio-cultural competence would be deeply explored in relation to higher levels of humour competence-performance, i.e. evaluation and creation of international tour guides.

14. Thesis-related publications:

- Giới thiệu mô hình biên soạn giáo trình tiếng Anh chuyên ngành dựa trên đường hướng lấy hoạt động học làm trung tâm. Tạp chí khoa học của Đại học Sư phạm Hà Nội, Volume 60, Number 1, 2015, tr. 123-130.

- Yếu tố hài hước trong truyện cười tiếng Anh: Từ văn bản đến ứng dụng cho lớp học ngoại ngữ. Tạp chí khoa học của Đại học Sư phạm Hà Nội, Volume 60, Number 2, 2015, tr. 138-147.