In this second post of my blog, I am going to talk about an aim to teach and convey the culture in the EFL teaching classes. As I said in the last post, is very important teaching the culture to English Language learners to achieve that these students would be able to be empathetic with the language and understand different aspects of the new language they will acquire.

In this post I will talk about Riddles.

When we are talking about riddles, we are referring to one way of cultural transfer.                      This method is known as oral tradition. In order to convey this tradition we have two different options: speech and songs. Riddles would be classified in the former option

Riddles are defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as a “type of question that describes something in a difficult and confusing way and has a clever or funny answer, often asked as a game”.

In the article “Teaching Metalinguistic Awareness and Reading Comprehension With Riddles” by Marcy Zipke, is said that children are enormously interested in word play. As she says they are interested by two reasons:

1^st It is funny.

2^nd It is how they discover things about the language.

Moreover, she adds in her article these discoveries that children do with word games that lead them to achieve the metalinguistic knowledge necessary for reading.

In the same article, Marcy Zipke says that Shade in 1991 pointed out that the source of humor in riddles includes understanding multiple meanings, metaphors and idioms; and perspective shifts. As the author says in other words, to understand and generate verbal humor, a student must exercise metalinguistic skills.

For this reasons I think is important to include Riddles and word games in class, because children would be interested, and they would learn and exercise their metalinguistic skills with the game.

By using riddles in class, active learning will be achieved. Therefore, while students develop their skills, they are enjoying the process, which in my opinion is fundamental.