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In recent times, the number of studies examining the use of humor in teaching English as a second language (ESL) in Asian countries has increased as researchers have acknowledged the positive effects that humor has on language teaching. This study presents a systematic review focused on the use of humor in ESL teaching within Asian countries. Its objectives are to acquire comprehensive knowledge of the current research status, research participants and methods, and research perspectives, and to examine the outcomes of incorporating humor into ESL instruction in Asian contexts in order to pinpoint research gaps for future studies. This study included the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (2020). Moreover, 35 articles relevant to the use of humor in Asian ESL teaching were identified as of the date when this study was conducted. After performing content analysis, the findings revealed that the first related articles in Asia were published in 2009, after which more and more articles emerged. These studies took place in 14 Asian countries, with most of them focusing on Turkey, Iran, and Indonesia. In addition, they involve diverse research methods and perspectives, whilst most of the participants are university students. This suggests that humor is more suitable for use when teaching high-proficiency English learners. Moreover, humor is a double-edged sword that has positive and negative impacts on ESL teaching in Asian countries. Finally, a number of recommendations for future studies have been proposed in this study.

Humor is a kind of cognitive psychology activity, and it is diverse among individuals. One of the main characteristics of talk shows is to produce humorous discourse to make the audience laugh; however, rare studies have made a deeper comparative investigation on the rhetorical strategies in different language humorous utterances. Therefore, the current study adopted a mixed method of sequential explanatory design to identify the types of rhetorical strategies in the monolog verbal humor of Chinese and English talk shows, examine their similarities and differences. Two hundred monolog samples from 2016 to 2022, which consisted of 100 monologs of Chinese talk shows (CTS) and 100 monologs of English talk shows (ETS), were downloaded from the internet as language corpus. Berger’s theory was adopted to identify the types of rhetorical strategies. Based on the obtained findings, this study found that both language talk show hosts use a variety type of rhetorical strategies to produce humorous discourse. The comparison of similarities and differences revealed that the most frequently used rhetorical strategies in both talk shows were almost similar (e.g., satire, exaggeration, facetiousness, and ridicule), but the percentage of usage of these various rhetorical strategies in both talk shows was slightly different. Interestingly, misunderstanding occurred 20 times in CTS but was not found in ETS. Meanwhile, simile and personification were used more often in ETS. Conclusively, this study contributes valuable insights on the use of different types of rhetorical strategies to create verbal humor in different language contexts.

Periacetabular osteotomy (PAO) is a surgical procedure to correct acetabular orientation in developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH). In this work, magnetic resonance imaging-based finite element models of hip joint were introduced to perform virtual surgery planning for patients with DDH. The optimal position of acetabulum following PAO was determined by analyzing the peak contact pressure and contact area between the femoral and pelvic cartilage when the acetabulum rotated from the original center edge (CE) angle in increments of 5°. Furthermore, with finite element analysis, we simulated joint movements in both the preoperative model and the planned model with the optimal position for the six cases. A comparison between the preoperative and planned models for all scenarios was made. The outcomes of finite element analysis revealed that the optimal position of acetabulum was at a CE angle of 20°. In all evaluated scenarios, the planned model showed lower peak contact pressure and larger contact area than the preoperative model did. The efficacy of virtual surgery planning was thus validated from a biomechanical perspective.

Pedagogic discourse has been studied stylistically from many theoretical perspectives. However, there is no recent systematic review of the functional stylistic approach to pedagogic discourse. This study presents a systematic review of the functional stylistic approach to analysing multimodal pedagogic discourse using Systemic Functional Linguistics and visual grammar. Through analysing studies from five databases, the review demonstrates that most studies focus on analysing multimodal pedagogic discourse, such as language, gesture, space, gaze, facial expressions, PowerPoint slides, mathematic symbolisms, whiteboard, and educational apps, from the perspectives of context, meta-functional meaning, and semiotic relations, and preferred qualitative analysis methods. The review also proposes a functional grammatical framework for pedagogic discourse stylistic analysis and implies a strong demand for a quantitative or mixed-methods approach to further investigate pedagogic discourse and its impact on pedagogic effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have pointed out that rhetorical strategies have a significant impact on producing humour in Chinese talk shows, while few of them have investigated the factors that affect the rhetorical choice in humorous discourse in that context. This study aims to identify the rhetorical strategies used in humorous discourse and investigate the factors that impact on the rhetorical strategies chosen by the hosts or comedians to produce humour. Thus, the current study selected 24 monologue samples from a popular programme called Rock & Roast and conducted a discourse analysis on them. Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theory is adopted to uncover the factors that influence rhetorical choice in the humorous discourse of Chinese talk shows. The findings reveal that the realisation of rhetorical strategies in the humorous discourse of talk shows is rich, including rhetorical devices, foreign language (English), and internet buzzwords, among other things. The main factors influencing the rhetorical strategies chosen in the humorous discourse in Chinese talk shows are the 'ratio' of 'agent and agency,'which are talk show comedians and the Chinese language. This study contributes to helping the audience gain a better understanding of rhetorical humour in Chinese talk shows and provides a new perspective for humorous discourse analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Verbal humor is a prominent characteristic of talk shows, which has inspired many humor linguists' study enthusiasms from a variety of perspectives. Nevertheless, the rhetorical strategies adopted by the host to achieve verbal humor in talk shows are always complex and not easy to understand by the audience. What's more, the literature on this point is scanty. To address the gap, the current research tries to examine the rhetorical strategies in the host's verbal humor on the Ellen talk show. Sixteen monologues from the Ellen talk show were selected as data resources. After the data was transcribed, the rhetorical fragments that made the audiences laugh were coded as data, and NVivo was used as the main instrument in the study's process of coding and analysing. The findings of the present study reveal that Ellen DeGeneres adopts eighteen kinds of rhetorical strategies to achieve verbal humor in her sixteen monologues: exaggeration, facetiousness, personification, satire, simile, over literalness, metaphor, puns, bombast, ridicule, irony, repartee, misunderstanding, insults, analogy, definition, infantilism, and allusion. Ellen tends to produce verbal humor with the type of single rhetorical strategy, but she also adopts the type of two or three mixed rhetorical strategies to produce verbal humor occasionally. Moreover, the use of rhetorical strategies in samples is unevenly distributed, and the data suggest that Ellen prefers to use the rhetoric of exaggeration, facetiousness, and satire more frequently than other rhetorical strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus continues to evolve and infect the global population, many individuals are likely to suffer from post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC). Manifestations of PASC include vision symptoms, but little is known about the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to infect and impact the retinal cells. Here, we demonstrate that SARS-CoV-2 can infect and perturb the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) in vivo, after intranasal inoculation of a transgenic mouse model of SARS-CoV-2 infection, and in cell culture. Separate lentiviral studies showed that SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein mediates viral entry and replication in RPE cells, while the Envelope and ORF3a proteins induce morphological changes. Infection with major variants of SARS-CoV-2 compromised the RPE barrier function and phagocytic capacity. It also caused complement activation and production of cytokines and chemokines, resulting in an inflammatory response that spread across the RPE layer. This inflammatory signature has similarities to that associated with the onset of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a major cause of human blindness, resulting from RPE pathology that eventually leads to photoreceptor cell loss. Thus, our findings suggest that post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection of the RPE may have long-term implications for vision, perhaps comparable to the increased occurrence of AMD found among individuals infected by HIV, but with greater public health consequences due to the much larger number of SARS-CoV-2 infections., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of National Academy of Sciences.)