Did you know that reading comprehension can be improved with the use of riddles? It’s no surprise to anyone who has ever had a 1st grader tell them the interrupting cow joke*, but by playing with language students can increase their metalinguistic awareness and also help their reading comprehension (Yuill, 2009).
Metalinguistic awareness is the ability to look at language, manipulate it, compare and contrast it, and see that meaning of words can change based on word placement and context. Using riddles can allow students to work on those skills and awareness!
The bonus is, riddles are so much fun! Zipke (2008), dove into different types of riddles with her students. She used two different types of riddles, ones with lexical ambiguity and ones with structural ambiguity (Zipke, 2008). Lexical ambiguity means that, to understand a joke, you have to understand more than one definition of a word. Structural ambiguity means being able to unchunk and rechunk parts of a sentence to understand the joke.
Here is an example Zipke provided of a riddle with lexical ambiguity:
Why are fish so smart?
Because they swim in schools!
School has two meanings, either the place where students go to learn or the actual name of a group of fish!
Here is an example Zipke provided of a riddle with structural ambiguity:
How do you make a hot dog stand?
You take away its chair!
The word that gets tricky here is ‘stand’! At risk of ruining the joke, the reason this is funny is because when you initially hear ‘hot dog stand’, you think of a place that sells hot dogs, but the punch line makes you have to rethink ‘hot dog stand’ as a ‘hot dog’ that is sitting.
One key point here is that you can work with your students with the use of homonyms. Homonyms are words that have more than one meaning, like the word bat (Zipke, 2008). Homonyms are fun to play with and allow students to discuss the meaning of words. Once you have a conversation about homonyms, students can try to create their own riddles!
So let’s get started! Check out this resource for some fun kid friendly jokes:
https://app.kidslisten.org/pod/Kid-Friendly-Joke-Of-The-Day
Yuill, N. (2009). The relation between ambiguity understanding and metalinguistic discussion of joking riddles in good and poor comprehenders: Potential for intervention and possible processes of change. First Language, 29(1), 65–79. https://doi.org/10.1177/0142723708097561
Zipke, M. (2008). Teaching metalinguistic awareness and reading comprehension with riddles: Understanding that words and sentences can have more than one meaning improves comprehension by allowing readers to think flexibly about the appropriate meaning.(Report). The Reading Teacher, 62(2), 128–137. https://doi.org/10.1598/RT.62.2.4
*Knock knock
Who’s there?
Interrupting cow.
Interrupting cow wh-
MOOO!
(Not a lexical or structural riddle, but really funny)
Here is an example Zipke provided of a riddle with lexical ambiguity:
Why are fish so smart?
Because they swim in schools!
School has two meanings, either the place where students go to learn or the actual name of a group of fish!
Here is an example Zipke provided of a riddle with structural ambiguity:
How do you make a hot dog stand?
You take away its chair!
The word that gets tricky here is ‘stand’! At risk of ruining the joke, the reason this is funny is because when you initially hear ‘hot dog stand’, you think of a place that sells hot dogs, but the punch line makes you have to rethink ‘hot dog stand’ as a ‘hot dog’ that is sitting.
One key point here is that you can work with your students with the use of homonyms. Homonyms are words that have more than one meaning, like the word bat (Zipke, 2008). Homonyms are fun to play with and allow students to discuss the meaning of words. Once you have a conversation about homonyms, students can try to create their own riddles!
So let’s get started! Check out this resource for some fun kid friendly jokes:
https://app.kidslisten.org/pod/Kid-Friendly-Joke-Of-The-Day
Yuill, N. (2009). The relation between ambiguity understanding and metalinguistic discussion of joking riddles in good and poor comprehenders: Potential for intervention and possible processes of change. First Language, 29(1), 65–79. https://doi.org/10.1177/0142723708097561
Zipke, M. (2008). Teaching metalinguistic awareness and reading comprehension with riddles: Understanding that words and sentences can have more than one meaning improves comprehension by allowing readers to think flexibly about the appropriate meaning.(Report). The Reading Teacher, 62(2), 128–137. https://doi.org/10.1598/RT.62.2.4
*Knock knock
Who’s there?
Interrupting cow.
Interrupting cow wh-
MOOO!
(Not a lexical or structural riddle, but really funny)
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