Negotiating the terms of engagement: Humor as a resource for managing interactional trouble in after-school tutoring encounters

•Examination of interactional trouble in tutoring encounters in after-school program.•Findings show role of humor in negotiating terms of tutor-tutee engagement.•Illustrates how focus on humor can highlight aspects of the communicative repertoires of emergent bilinguals.•Explores affordances of linguistic ethnography for researching humor and training tutors. This paper examines how tutors and tutees negotiate the terms of their engagement within the context of an after-school program in the United States of America that pairs university students with immigrant children from Bangladesh for the purpose of working through the children's homework assignments. Drawing on insights and approaches from linguistic ethnography, it argues that humor plays a meaningful yet overlooked role both in managing the transactional and interpersonal dimensions of homework help sessions and in illuminating the ongoing tensions and uncertainties at various levels of social organization that tutors and tutees encounter as they engage with one another. Likewise, it shows how a focus on humorous talk can illuminate aspects of tutees’ communicative repertoires as emergent bilinguals that may go unnoticed when only serious talk is considered. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of this study's findings for the preparation of tutors working in bi/multilingual settings.