ABSTRACT
Hong Kong students' reticence and anxiety in second language classrooms has been a cause for concern. The research on local English is learned as a second language (ESL) classroom interaction reveals that increasing student responses and lively interaction are in the form of verbal play. The kind of language play or verbal play falls mainly under the category of mimicry in Caillois' classification of games that involves the playing of sounds. The biggest category of fun-making linguistic play reveals students' nonsensical but often adept word play based on phonological properties of the utterances. The chapter presents different types of playful discourses of the students, and sometimes of the teachers, including phonological play, social talk, teases, and taboos. Students' linguistic play based on phonological and semantic properties of L1 and L2, although highly nonsensical sometimes, reveals their creativity and meta-linguistic awareness of the two language systems at work.
