This paper explores the intersection between TV comedy shows, language learning and blended learning at higher education level in France. It analyses a class of English as a foreign language to non-specialist students which was taught throughout the academic year 2007-2008. The class was based on an extract from a British TV comedy show, The Office, which is available on YouTube. Students were given access to a Moodle website on which follow up activities were available. In keeping with the stated aims of the Bologna Declaration, higher education institutions are now developing the necessary means to ensure that students master foreign languages so that they can study abroad, in Europe or elsewhere for a semester or more. This paper contends that combined with face-to-face teaching, a Virtual Learning Environment provides a satisfactory answer to the challenges language teaching in higher education faces today.
The first section of the paper looks at how this pedagogical experience uses a polysemous five-minute extract combining various interpretative networks. The show adopts the tone of a mock documentary about supposedly everyday characters. However, since the show is a comedy, there is a rub: in the extract studied in this paper one character stands out by not providing the expected answer to a given exercise, and instead questions the rules and adds his own personal comments. The show focuses on this particular character and the way he interacts with the other characters; the meeting of the two provides the comic moments.
The second section of the paper considers how Moodle supplies the dynamic for an in-depth exploration of an extract featuring several layers of misunderstanding. The role of the language teacher and his/her use of blended learning to decode an extract featuring an almost classroom-like situation - namely a situation of collective deduction intended to lead to collective decision-making as well as team building - is examined. This paper argues that the traditional use and appropriation of authentic videos in class is taken one step further by means of a Virtual Environment. A Moodle-based lesson of this type gives rise to novel – and varied – decoding processes hereby leading each student to respond and react in authentic English. The use of Moodle in class and outside the classroom together with online team building exercises allows a detailed analysis of the conflictual situation in the extract and the character’s inability to fit in with the group. Several activities may be envisaged: eliciting the unsaid can initially be carried out in class collectively and then individually on the Moodle, for instance. Learners can also be asked to play the role of script-writers along the lines of popular TV shows such as Friends or Extras in which language simultaneously drives the plot forward and reflects national identities.
Finally, the paper considers how such a use of blended learning complements and enhances language teaching in a somewhat debated French higher education context. Blended learning is also a way for the learner to become more familiar with a culture, which however tame or foreign it may look, offers unexpected variations through the use characters make of language. The characters inability to come to an agreement at the meeting featured in the extract in many ways reflects real-life situations students may be confronted with at home or in other cultural environments. The fact that Moodle can be u