"Ma Sha Allah!": Creating Community Through Humor Practices in a Diverse Arabic Language Flagship Classroom

Drawing on Lave and Wenger's (1991) and Wenger's (1998) communities of practice (CoP) framework, this study explores the shared repertoire of humor practices in the creation of community within the context of a culturally diverse and multilevel adult Arabic language classroom consisting of two native speakers, five heritage language learners (HLLs), and three second language (L2) learners. These learners were the first cohort of students to participate in a new government-funded university Arabic Flagship Program. Employing both a macro-level ethnographic analysis and a micro-level discourse analysis of video-taped classroom interaction, this study analyzes how participants displayed their individual and relational identities (Boxer & Cortés-Conde, 1997), community membership, and levels of participation in this classroom community through conversational joking and responses to canned joke-telling by the teacher