The social media space is replete with ‘teachers’ like Lizzy Jay Omo Ibadan, who deploy
the medium to poke fun at the problem of ‘at risk-readers’. Her Lesson Comic Skits are
dramatised parodies which foreground some L2 learners’ reading challenges in English.
She creatively uses the Yorubanised English to construct wittiness through phonological
misrepresentations of the principles of Grammar translation method in her English
lesson clinic. Such a method of teaching unfamiliar English words often create serious
problems of mispronunciation to the undiscerning L2 learners who might not see the
underlying jokes in this method. Consequently, this study analyses the phonological
misrepresentations of her productions of the test items, discusses how the dramatised
speeches evoke humour and determine the effectiveness of the deployment of this
pedagogical approach to teaching English pronunciation. The data were drawn from 4
episodes of her Lesson Comic Skits downloaded from YouTube. They were played back
with VLC player and subjected to perceptual analysis, drawing insights from
Incongruity Theory of Humour and Bilingual Interactive Model. The analysis revealed
that the pronunciation of the test items was distorted and the outputs were rendered
through Yoruba-English bilingual phonological pathways, thereby causing syllabic
reconfigurations, declusterisation, segmental substitutions and meaning impairments. It
concluded that translation method of teaching English words deployed in the skits
focused more on identity creation and humour than its effectiveness in teaching
pronunciation.
JAPPPIN Vol 4