Unit 3 A taste of English humour

The third period Using Language
(Jokes about Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson)
Aims
To help students read the paragraph of Jokes about Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson
To help students to use the language by reading, listening, speaking and writing.
Procedures
I. Warming up
Warming up by reading school jokes
There are lots of jokes in English about school life. Read these two to see whether you will laugh or not.
Why must we learn this? 为什么要学这个呀？
One day our professor was discussing a particularly complicated concept. A pre-med student rudely interrupted to ask, "Why do we have to learn this pointless information"

"To save lives." the professor responded quickly and continued the lecture.

A few minutes later, the same student spoke up again. "So how does physics save lives?" he persisted.

"It keeps the ignoramuses like you out of medical school," replied the professor.
II. Guided reading
1．Reading and translating
Read the paragraph on page 22 and translate it into Chinese sentence by sentence.
2. Reading and underlining
Next you are to read the paragph and underline all the useful expressions or collocations in it. Copy them to your notebook after class as homework.
Collocations from the paragraph on page 22
Go camp, in a mountainous area, lie in the open air, under the stars, look up at the stars, think of…, try a third time, in one’s beds
3. Doing the exercise
Now you are going to do the exercise No. 1 on page 22.
III.Guided Speaking
Think of funny stories in English and telll them to your group mates.
IV.Guided Writing—Learn to write jokes
There are two main parts to the structure of a joke. The first prepares you for the laugh by telling a story which creates a sense of expectation. The second part of the joke, the punch line, provokes laughter by telling an unexpected and different story, yet one which is still compatible with the first, as in this example: "My wife just ran off with my best friend. Boy, do I miss him." and "I had a mud pack facial done, and for three days my face looked much better. Then the mud fell off." Notice the assumption that is made in both these examples. In the first, you assume the person telling the story is angry with his wife, so the punch line surprises you because he's feeling something different and unexpected. Again, in the second example, you'd most likely assume the mud had been removed, leaving the face looking better, so the punch line takes you by surprise.
So, to write jokes you need to practice reading statements and writing down the asumptions you make about them. You must be able to interpret the statement (first story line) in at least two different ways in order to provide the second, different story i.e. the punch line. And what to write about? Anything that interests you. Anything you have strong opinions about.
Now write down your own jokes, in English.
IV. Closing down by acting
To end this period, we are going to act the film by Charlie Chaplin The G

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